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    The Saudification of America is under way | Karen Attiah

    The first time I ever used the words “alhumdulilah”, which translates to praise be to God in Arabic, was the night of 16 November 2018. A Friday night news alert came through on my phone: “CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination.” I collapsed into my couch, repeating the words.I am not Muslim. But Jamal, in life and death, has taught me a lot about faith and looking for hope in all the wrong places. As a writer with a history of criticizing America’s meddling in weaker countries, in normal circumstances, I should have been loath to celebrate the CIA.But given that, a month before, a group of Saudi hitmen not only kidnapped my friend and writer from a consulate in Istanbul but allegedly cut his body into pieces, I might have been forgiven for looking for any hope that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, would face consequences – cutting off leaders who think nothing of cutting up human beings should be a basic tenet of any healthy country’s foreign policy. (Prince Mohammed has denied any involvement or responsibility for Khashoggi’s killing.)This week, seven years almost to the day since the CIA announced the crown prince’s responsibility in the murder, Mohammed bin Salman returns to Washington, invited for an offical visit by America’s Temu pharaoh, Donald Trump. The reconciliation between Trump and MBS was perhaps inevitable, given that even before the first Trump presidency, Trump spoke often of his love for the Saudis and their wealth. (“I get along great with all of them; they buy apartments from me. They spend $40m, $50m,” he quipped in 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”)In 2016 Saudi Arabia banned Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime editor, journalist and royal adviser from writing. His crime? He published an op-ed warning about the rise of Trump in 2016. He remained silent for a year, until Prince Mohammed unleashed a crackdown on businessmen, writers, and mild critics – imprisoning many of them. Jamal fled to the US in self-exile.In September 2017, while I was the editor of the Washington Post’s global opinion section, I asked Jamal to write for us. He published “Saudi Arabia was not always this repressive, but now it’s unbearable”, breaking his year-long silence. I hired him to continue to write for the Washington Post.A year later, Saudi Arabia had Jamal killed. In the aftermath of Jamal’s murder, Trump administration officials worked overtime to launder Saudi Arabia’s blood-stained image. Jared Kushner was advising Prince Mohammed on how to “weather the storm”. Last year, Kushner’s equity firm received $2bn from Saudi Arabia’s private equity firm.There’s much to say about the Saudification of western cultural spaces through the sheer sums of money the kingdom is so obviously throwing into what it sees as soft power. Writers and observers have commented for years about Saudi Arabia’s “sportswashing”, like the kingdom’s sponsorship of LIV golf tournament and the purchase of the Newcastle United soccer team.The kingdom invested heavily in tourism campaigns for Saudi Arabia, paying online influencers hefty sums to post pictures of their heavily curated trips to the country.Jamal warned about these hollow visions of Saudi Arabia. He warned that behind the glitz and glamour of the Saudi royal family, and promises of futuristic cities, there was poverty and discontent. He often told me how proud he was to have his words in the Washington Post, and he hoped the Post could be a model for voices like his to be heard. I still admire Jamal’s relentless optimism about media and America.In death, Jamal’s faith would prove to be misplaced. The Washington Post’s erasure of Jamal’s memory and the freedom he stood for has been brewing in the background.The global opinion section that Jamal wrote for was dismantled. The Jamal Khashoggi fellowship – which was offered to writers speaking out against authoritarian regimes – was left to fade away. Jamal used to tell me about his days as an editor chairing newspaper editorial meetings in Saudi Arabia, where editors were given marching orders from the top about the “red lines”, or what the royal regime wanted and did not want published.Today, the Washington Post opinion section is going through an increasing Saudification – imposing harsh red lines on who and what can publish. Under owner Jeff Bezos’s edict to write only about “free markets” and “personal liberties”, the Washington Post opinion section, the first major US paper to publicly impose such heavy censorship, purged nearly all its full-time voices that wrote against censorship, political violence and repression at home and abroad, myself included.To date, the Washington Post editorial board has not mentioned Jamal’s name ahead of Prince Mohammed’s visit. The Saudification of the mainstream news media means that other US media outlets and institutions are bending the knee to Trump, agreeing to multimillion-dollar shakedowns in exchange for eliminating diversity. He has sued outlets he claims were not fair to him. He has begun attempting to prosecute his political rivals. Pro-Saudi voices would argue that moralizing about chopped-up journalists does us no good, shouldn’t get in the way of the US-Saudi partnership, that there is too much money at stake, and that in order for the west’s colonial management of the Middle East, we need our friends in Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. They are effectively asking Americans to believe that America and Saudi Arabia will make the world a better place, together.This narrative only helps the billionaires and the deal brokers. The average American gains next to nothing from these elite arrangements. Rather, Jamal’s plight and murder was a warning sign for America, of the impending loss of freedom and censorship that would sweep the country.

    Karen Attiah is a writer and educator whose work focuses on race, global culture and human rights More

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    Trump defends Saudi crown prince over Khashoggi killing, threatens ABC News in White House meeting – as it happened

    Donald Trump welcomed crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington on Tuesday, in the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia’s first White House visit since the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul. The shocking murder caused global outrage and appeared to set the Gulf kingdom on a path to international pariah status. In 2021 US intelligence concluded that bin Salman had approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the Saudi regime. The crown prince has denied ordering the operation but acknowledged responsibility as the kingdom’s de facto ruler. Seven years on, that shocking murder seemed a distant memory, as MBS arrived to a lavish display including fanfare, a US Marine band and a military flyover as he stepped onto the South Lawn of the White House to meet Trump.

    Talking to reporters in the Oval Office, the US president brushed off questions from a reporter about MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s killing, saying “things happen”. “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said of the murdered columnist, before going on to contradict US intelligence on the Saudi crown prince’s role in the affair. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him, or didn’t like him, things happen. But he [bin Salman] knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that.” While Trump castigated the reporter for the question, a calm MBS said:“It’s painful and it’s a huge mistake, and we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”

    The crown prince announced Saudi Arabia was raising its planned investments in the US to almost $1tn, up from $600bn that the Saudis said they planned to invest when Trump visited the kingdom in May. MBS said the kingdom has “huge demand” for computing power and desires US AI chips. Trump also said he “can see” a deal happening to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, but didn’t specify a timeline. Against a backdrop of subdued oil prices and MBS’s high spending on megaprojects at home, that figure is likely very unrealistic, but Trump seemed thrilled nonetheless.

    Trump also pushed back on the notion that there was a conflict of interest, given his family’s strong personal interest in the kingdom. “I have nothing to do with the family business,” said Trump, adding that his family has relatively little interest in the kingdom. In September, London real estate developer Dar Global announced that it plans to launch Trump Plaza in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. It’s Dar Global’s second collaboration with the Trump Organization, the collection of companies controlled by Trump’s children, in Saudi Arabia. Last year, the two companies announced the launch of Trump Tower Jeddah.

    Trump confirmed that he had agreed to sell the Saudis F-35 fighter jets despite some concerns within the administration that the sale could lead to China gaining access to the US technology behind the advanced weapon system. The agreement will be similar to the one the US has with Israel, which is significant as until now Israel has been the only country in the Middle East to have the jets. The move has the potential to alter the military balance in the region. As Politico noted earlier: “A major arms deal would signal a sea change in the US approach to Saudi Arabia: No longer would deeper ties between the two countries be so dependent on Saudi Arabia normalising relations with Israel.”

    On that subject, MBS made clear that normalisation with Israel (i.e. Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, which Trump really wants) could not happen without first securing a clear path towards a two-state solution. The crown prince said he wants Israelis and Palestinians “to coexist peacefully” in the region. Trump has been trying to nudge the Saudis to join the accords for some time and said today he felt he’d had a “positive response”. But it’s worth remembering that Israel, meanwhile, remains steadfastly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.

    Trump will return to the South Lawn later, with first lady Melania, to welcome the crown prince when he returns for the evening East Room dinner. In addition to today’s White House pomp, the two nations are also planning an investment summit at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday that will include the heads of Salesforce, Qualcomm, Pfizer, the Cleveland Clinic, Chevron and Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural gas company, where even more deals with the Saudis could be announced.
    And I’ll leave you with my colleague Julian Borger’s report on the visit:

    Donald Trump welcomed crown prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington on Tuesday, in the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia’s first White House visit since the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul. The shocking murder caused global outrage and appeared to set the Gulf kingdom on a path to international pariah status. In 2021 US intelligence concluded that bin Salman had approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the Saudi regime. The crown prince has denied ordering the operation but acknowledged responsibility as the kingdom’s de facto ruler. Seven years on, that shocking murder seemed a distant memory, as MBS arrived to a lavish display including fanfare, a US Marine band and a military flyover as he stepped onto the South Lawn of the White House to meet Trump.

    Talking to reporters in the Oval Office, the US president brushed off questions from a reporter about MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s killing, saying “things happen”. “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said of the murdered columnist, before going on to contradict US intelligence on the Saudi crown prince’s role in the affair. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him, or didn’t like him, things happen. But he [bin Salman] knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that.” While Trump castigated the reporter for the question, a calm MBS said:“It’s painful and it’s a huge mistake, and we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”

    The crown prince announced Saudi Arabia was raising its planned investments in the US to almost $1tn, up from $600bn that the Saudis said they planned to invest when Trump visited the kingdom in May. MBS said the kingdom has “huge demand” for computing power and desires US AI chips. Trump also said he “can see” a deal happening to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, but didn’t specify a timeline. Against a backdrop of subdued oil prices and MBS’s high spending on megaprojects at home, that figure is likely very unrealistic, but Trump seemed thrilled nonetheless.

    Trump also pushed back on the notion that there was a conflict of interest, given his family’s strong personal interest in the kingdom. “I have nothing to do with the family business,” said Trump, adding that his family has relatively little interest in the kingdom. In September, London real estate developer Dar Global announced that it plans to launch Trump Plaza in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. It’s Dar Global’s second collaboration with the Trump Organization, the collection of companies controlled by Trump’s children, in Saudi Arabia. Last year, the two companies announced the launch of Trump Tower Jeddah.

    Trump confirmed that he had agreed to sell the Saudis F-35 fighter jets despite some concerns within the administration that the sale could lead to China gaining access to the US technology behind the advanced weapon system. The agreement will be similar to the one the US has with Israel, which is significant as until now Israel has been the only country in the Middle East to have the jets. The move has the potential to alter the military balance in the region. As Politico noted earlier: “A major arms deal would signal a sea change in the US approach to Saudi Arabia: No longer would deeper ties between the two countries be so dependent on Saudi Arabia normalising relations with Israel.”

    On that subject, MBS made clear that normalisation with Israel (i.e. Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords, which Trump really wants) could not happen without first securing a clear path towards a two-state solution. The crown prince said he wants Israelis and Palestinians “to coexist peacefully” in the region. Trump has been trying to nudge the Saudis to join the accords for some time and said today he felt he’d had a “positive response”. But it’s worth remembering that Israel, meanwhile, remains steadfastly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.

    Trump will return to the South Lawn later, with first lady Melania, to welcome the crown prince when he returns for the evening East Room dinner. In addition to today’s White House pomp, the two nations are also planning an investment summit at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday that will include the heads of Salesforce, Qualcomm, Pfizer, the Cleveland Clinic, Chevron and Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil and natural gas company, where even more deals with the Saudis could be announced.
    If you’re just joining us, Donald Trump has welcomed Mohammed bin Salman to Washington, as the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia seeks to rebrand himself as a global statesman in his first White House visit since the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.Trump warmly received the crown prince when he arrived at the White House this morning for a pomp-filled ceremony that included a military flyover and a thundering greeting from the US Marine band.The US-Saudi relationship had been sent into a tailspin by the operation targeting Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the kingdom, that US intelligence agencies later determined MBS likely directed the agents to carry out.But seven years later, Khashoggi was an afterthought as the two leaders unveiled billions of dollars in deals and Trump brushed off questions to the crown prince about the journalist’s gruesome murder.“Whether you like [Khashoggi] or didn’t like him, things happen,” Trump said, referring to the murdered Washington Post columnist as “extremely controversial”. “But he [bin Salman] knew nothing about it,” he said of bin Salman.Trump chastised the reporter for “embarrassing our guest” with the question and went on to commended the Saudi leader for strides made by the kingdom on human rights without providing any specific detail.“I’m very proud of the job he’s done,” Trump said. “What’s he done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else.”Trump lashes out once again at a reporter’s question, calling her a “terrible reporter” and saying he believes ABC News’s broadcasting license should be revoked.The reporter had asked him why he wouldn’t just release the Epstein files rather than wait for Congress to do it. He says.
    I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.
    It’s worth noting that MBS, in comparison, has remained calm and confident in the face of tough questions.Trump says he “can see” a deal happening to transfer American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, but doesn’t specify any sort of timeline, adding it’s not urgent.Trump says he spoke with bin Salman about the Abraham Accords, adding that he believes he got a positive response.The crown prince adds that while Saudi Arabia wants to be part of the accords, which normalises ties with Israel, it also wants to make sure it secures a clear path for a two-state solution.He says he wants Israelis and Palestinians “to coexist peacefully” in the region.Trump says the US would sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in a similar arrangement it has with Israel.“As far as I’m concerned, I think they are both at a level where they should get top of the line [F-35s],” he says, referring to Saudi and Israel as great allies. Israel and Saudi Arabia have never had formal diplomatic relations but have engaged in covert cooperation on issues such as Iran.Trump says the United States has reached a defense deal with Saudi Arabia.As the Trump Organization and a Saudi developer look to open the latest Trump hotel in the Maldives, Trump is asked about a possible conflict of interest for the Trump Organization to do business with Saudi Arabia while he is president. He replies:
    I have nothing to do with the family business. I have left, and I’ve devoted 100% of my energy. What my family does is fine. They do business all over.
    They’ve done very little with Saudi Arabia actually. I’m sure they could do a lot, and anything they’ve done has been very good.
    An ABC reporter then addresses the elephant in the room, asking whether why Americans should trust bin Salman given that US intelligence concluded that he orchestrated the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.Trump blasts ABC News as fake news, before contradicting US intelligence on the Saudi crown prince’s role in Khashoggi death:
    You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman [Khashoggi] that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen. But he [bin Salman] knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.
    As I noted earlier, US intelligence concluded in 2021 that bin Salman approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The crown prince denied ordering the operation but acknowledged responsibility as the kingdom’s de facto ruler. Here’s our report on that from the time:Asked by a reporter whether Saudi Arabia can really continue to invest as much as $1tn in the United States given the reality of lower oil prices, bin Salman says the kingdom was not “creating fake opportunities to please America or please Trump” and that Saudi Arabia has “huge demand” for computing power and desires US advanced chips.Trump says he is working to approve the sale of advanced US AI chips to Saudi Arabia, signalling a major shift in export policy and deepening tech ties with the kingdom.“We’ve been really good friends for a long period of time,” Trump says of the crown prince.“I want to thank you because you’ve agreed to invest $600bn into the United States, and because he’s my friend, he might make it a trillion, but I’m going to have to work on him,” Trump says, referring to bin Salman.Bin Salman then says in response that Saudi Arabia “believes in the future of America” and is going to increase its pledge to almost $1tn of investment in the United States.Talks in the Oval Office are underway, albeit somewhat behind schedule. I’ll bring you any key news lines here.Bearing in mind that, while this is not a state visit – Mohammed bin Salman is not technically the Saudi head of state, though he is the kingdom’s de facto leader – that ceremony was definitely more lavish than your average state visit arrival, including the Marine band and officers on horseback flying the Saudi and US flags.The two men have been speaking as they walk along the row of presidential portraits on the colonnade at the White House, which Trump recently unveiled as the “Presidential Walk of Fame”.Here are some more pictures capturing the pomp and circumstance Donald Trump has put on for MBS.Mohammed bin Salman arrived at the White House to fanfare and a jet flyover moments ago, as he seeks to further rehabilitate his global image after the brutal 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and deepen ties with Washington.Making his first White House visit in more than seven years, the crown prince was greeted with a lavish display of pomp and ceremony presided over by Donald Trump on the South Lawn, complete with a military honour guard, a cannon salute and a flyover by US warplanes. More

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    House passes bill to release Epstein files with near-unanimous support

    The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill with nearly unanimous support that will force the release of investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, after Donald Trump and his Republican allies backed down from their opposition amid a scandal that has dogged the president since his return to the White House.The measure now awaits consideration by the Senate, where the Republican majority leader, John Thune, has not said if or when he will put it up for a vote. A spokesperson for Thune did not respond to a request for comment.Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, announced after the bill’s House passage that he would later on Tuesday ask for the chamber to pass it unanimously.“We have an opportunity to get this bill done today and have it on the president’s desk to be signed into law tonight. We should seize that opportunity,” he said.Though Trump has for months dismissed the uproar over the government’s handling of the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax”, he signaled his support for the House bill over the weekend, and said he would sign the measure if it reaches his desk. On Tuesday morning, the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, announced he would vote for it, making its passage certain.Democrats, along with survivors of Epstein and their advocates who were seated in a House gallery, broke into applause after the bill was passed. The sole “no” vote came from Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who said he worried the measure would make public identifying details of witnesses, potential suspects and others caught up in the investigation.Several of the president’s allies who voted for the bill did so only after criticizing it in floor speeches, arguing Democrats were being insincere but that the House could spend no more time on the matter.“As President Trump has stated, we have nothing to hide, nothing to hide here,” said Republican congressman Troy Nehls. “I’m voting to release the files so that we can move on from the [smear] campaign the Democrats have manufactured. God bless Donald J Trump.”Republican judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan argued that Democrats could have pushed for the files’ release during Joe Biden’s presidency. “Why now, after four years of doing nothing? Because going after President Trump is an obsession with these guys.”Even as he announced his support, Johnson criticized the measure for not doing enough to protect victims of Epstein, a financier who died in 2019 by what investigators determined was suicide while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.“Everybody here, all the Republicans, want to go on record to show we’re for maximum transparency, but they also want to note that we’re demanding that this stuff get corrected before it is ever moves through the process and is complete,” Johnson said.Any changes to the bill made by the Senate would require it to be approved again by the House, probably delaying its enactment.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, wrote on X that he had “been calling for full transparency in the Epstein case since 2019” and that the chamber should vote on the bill “ASAP”.The Epstein case returned dramatically to the public eye in July, when the justice department and FBI released a memo saying they had nothing further to disclose about the investigation. That flew in the face of statements made by Trump and his top officials that indicated they would release more information about Epstein’s offenses and ties to global elites once they took office.Shortly after, four dissident Republicans in the House and all Democrats banded together to force a vote on a bill to release the investigative files, over Johnson’s objections.The leaders of that effort cheered the imminent vote, with the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna calling Tuesday “the first day of real reckoning for the Epstein class”.“Because survivors spoke up, because of their courage, the truth is finally going to come out, and when it comes out, this country is really going to have a moral reckoning. How did we allow this to happen?” Khanna said at a press conference, adding that the case was “one of the most horrific and disgusting corruption scandals in our country’s history.”Trump’s friendship with Epstein has had staying power in American politics as the late disgraced financier had links to many other rich and powerful figures in the US and overseas. The president’s dramatic shift came after it became increasingly apparent that the bill would pass the GOP-controlled House, most likely with significant support from Republican lawmakers. Trump in recent days changed his approach from outright opposition to declarations of indifference.“I DON’T CARE!” the president wrote in a social media post on Sunday. “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he did not want the Epstein scandal to “deflect” from the White House’s successes, and claimed it was a “hoax” and “a Democrat problem”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ll give them everything,” he told reporters. “Let the Senate look at it, let anybody look at it, but don’t talk about it too much, because honestly, I don’t want to take it away from us.”Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who frequently defies Trump and joined with Khanna to pursue the files’ release, noted the president’s reversal on the Epstein issue.“We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice-president to get this win,” he said. “But they’re on our side today, though, so let’s give them some credit as well.”In July, Khanna and Massie turned to a procedural tactic known as a discharge petition to circumvent House leadership and compel a vote on their bill, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, if a majority of the 435-member House signs on.Johnson went to extraordinary lengths to avoid a vote on the the measure, which splintered his conference. Democrats accused the speaker of delaying the swearing-in of the Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva to prevent her from becoming the decisive 218th signatory. She signed her name to the petition moments after officially taking office last week.As president, Trump has the authority to order the justice department to release the documents in its possession, as he has previously done with the government records related to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and John F Kennedy.Emails made public last week by a House committee that has opened a separate inquiry into the scandal showed Epstein believed Trump “knew about the girls”, though it was not clear what that phrase meant. The White House said the released emails contained no proof of wrongdoing by Trump.Last week, the president instructed the justice department to investigate prominent Democrats’ ties to Epstein. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, who earlier this year said a review of the files revealed no further investigative leads, replied to Trump that she would get on it right away and has appointed a prosecutor to lead the effort.The Epstein scandal is a core issue for a swathe of Trump’s rightwing base, some of whom believe in conspiracy theories that surround Epstein and his coterie of powerful friends and associates. Unlike many other issues, the Epstein files have prompted rebellions from Trump’s supporters in politics and the media, who have called on the president to follow through on his campaign promise to release them.Meanwhile, several Epstein survivors have ramped up pressure on Congress and Trump to advance the measure.“It’s time that we put the political agendas and party affiliations to the side. This is a human issue. This is about children,” survivor Haley Robson said at the press conference. “There is no place in society for exploitation, sexual crimes or exploitation of women.”She then addressed her comments to Trump, saying: “While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files, and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is.”On Monday night, activists projected an image of Trump and Epstein on to the justice department building, accompanied by the message: “Release the files now.” More

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    Will Marjorie Taylor Greene turn the Maga movement against Trump? | Arwa Mahdawi

    There are 535 members of Congress; only a dozen or so are household names. If you want to achieve that sort of brand name recognition, there are a few tried-and-tested ways to do so. You can spend years working your way up the ranks until you’re a power-broker like Nancy Pelosi. You can burst on to the scene and dramatically unseat an incumbent like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did. Or you can go the Marjorie Taylor Greene route and achieve notoriety by being utterly unhinged.Since becoming a congresswoman for Georgia in 2021, Greene has kept herself in the news by spouting conspiracy theories, fighting with colleagues, and being one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. In recent months, however, something strange has been happening. Greene has continued to generate headlines, but largely because she has turned on her party and is part of a growing Maga civil war. Greene was the first Republican lawmaker, for example, to say that there is a genocide in Gaza and has been one of the loudest voices demanding that the Epstein files be released. She has also criticised the Maga movement for not focusing on affordability or putting America first. Now, things have escalated to the point where Greene is making Trump see red; the pair are in a full-blown feud.On Friday the president, who stood by Greene when she voiced conspiracy theories about school shootings and claimed that wildfires were started by space lasers, announced on Truth Social that he was finally withdrawing his endorsement of the congresswoman. “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” he complained. Adding: “I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day.”Greene, meanwhile, has said that Trump’s comments are “hurtful” but she still supports his administration and hopes they “make up”. She has also said she believes that his comments have fuelled threats against her safety. When asked on Sunday about these threats, Trump said: “I don’t think her life is in danger … I don’t think anybody cares about her.”But that last bit isn’t quite true. If Greene learned anything from her apprenticeship with Trump, it’s how to generate media coverage. The congresswoman’s face is everywhere. And while she may no longer be buddies with the president, she is building bridges with former foes. On Sunday, for example, she appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and apologised for her role in “toxic politics”. And earlier this month, she went on the high-profile talkshow The View and criticised her party for not having a health care plan. “You are a very different person than I thought you were,” the presenter, Sunny Hostin, said.So is Greene a different person? I’d love it if that truly were the case; it would be heartening to believe that some of the most toxic people in US politics might be capable of introspection and change. Alas, I don’t think this is some sort of road to Damascus moment. Rather, as Ocasio-Cortez has posited, this is more likely a case of sour grapes. AOC’s theory is that the Trump administration shut down Greene’s ambitions to run for Senate and she “has been on a revenge tour ever since”. Greene said at the time that she didn’t believe she could make a difference as a senator and wanted to continue to serve her congressional district.She’s not alone in her revenge tour. The Republican congressman Thomas Massie, who along with the Democrat Ro Khanna is leading a bipartisan push to release the Epstein files, has also been trading barbs with the president. In a dramatic U-turn, Trump has now had to concede defeat on the files, declaring on Sunday that he’s happy to have a vote on the issue, as “we have nothing to hide”.Trump has bounced back from scandals that would have buried most people. He is, let’s not forget, the first convicted criminal elected to the presidency. But it’s not just the Epstein files and traitorous deputies that he’s battling at the moment. According to a recent NBC News poll, 63% of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, said that Trump has fallen short of their expectations on the economy. The president has been building ballrooms and blowing up boats instead of lowering the price of bread. While his base is still loyal, his approval ratings are eroding. Whatever Greene’s motives, her political instincts are sharp: there’s a real opportunity now to turn the Republican party against Trump. May the revenge tour roll on. Perhaps, with all this infighting, Greene will turn the electoral map blue. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead More

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    Mahmood Mamdani on Zohran, Uganda and forced expulsion: ‘Who is part of the nation and who is not?’

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    The night before Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972, a senior professor from the university where he had been employed as a lowly teaching assistant wandered into his family home, looking for spoils. The rest of the family had already left – for the UK, the US and Tanzania – but 26-year-old Mamdani had decided to remain until the final day of the three-month period that Idi Amin, the Ugandan president, had designated for all Asians to leave the country. Passing over the furniture and other remnants of decades of family life, the professor hit upon a carton of Johnnie Walker Red, which Mamdani invited him to take home.The next day, reunited with his parents at a transit camp in London, Mamdani learned that the bottles had in fact held nothing but cooking oil, and he amused himself imagining the professor serving them at a party to celebrate the forced departure of tens of thousands of south Asians. It was only later that the “loneliness, anxiety [and] depression” of expulsion set in. Mamdani would go on to join the vibrant intellectual community in Dar es Salaam, where his superfluity of study groups was populated by a who’s who of pan-African scholars and politicians; his parents settled in Wembley, in north-west London, where for several years their “favorite pastime” was greeting the weekly flight from Uganda to Gatwick airport in hopes of meeting a former acquaintance.“Every place we lived in after the expulsion, we lived as if we were guests, our houses or rooms stamped with the feeling of being transients,” Mamdani writes in his book Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, published this October. “With the loss of Uganda, we lost a sense of belonging, and of rootedness.”The question of who belongs in a political community has animated Mamdani’s scholarship ever since. Now a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Mamdani has gained recent notoriety (alongside his wife, film director Mira Nair) as the father of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City political phenomenon and mayor-elect. But his long career and extensive bibliography attest to a lifetime interrogating the colonial categories that continue to define and divide postcolonial politics: race, tribe, Indigeneity; citizen, settler, subject.View image in fullscreenIn Slow Poison, Mamdani turns his attention back to the nation that he has always considered his home, even when it wouldn’t have him. The book combines memoir, history and political theory to reassess two men who have defined Uganda since it achieved independence from the UK in 1962: Amin and Yoweri Museveni. It also grapples with big questions with contemporary relevance: who chooses our global villains, and why? How do notions of Indigeneity operate in a world where people always have migrated – and always will? Who gets to decide which people belong, and deserve rights, in a given country?Amin is primarily known to westerners as a brutal dictator and rumored cannibal, but he enjoyed significant popular support in Uganda from the time he took power in a 1971 coup until he was overthrown in 1979. Mamdani attributes this in part to his expropriation and expulsion of the country’s 80,000 Asian people – most of them the descendants of Indian immigrants who arrived during British colonial rule – in an act of racial nationalism that helped unite Uganda’s disparate ethnic groups and tribes in a shared Black identity.Museveni, a onetime Marxist and devotee of Frantz Fanon who frequented the same intellectual circles as Mamdani in Dar es Salaam, took power in 1986 and has yet to relinquish it. His increasingly authoritarian regime has been characterized by extreme corruption, regional conflicts and human rights violations, Mamdani argues, but “whereas the British propaganda machine turned Amin into a monster and Asians his global victims, Museveni became a Washington poster boy”.The disparate treatment is a result of the two men’s stances toward the west, Mamdani argues. Amin seized power with the backing of the UK and Israel – the UK maintained a strong interest in its former colony, while Israel sought an ally that would allow it to build a military base to the south of Egypt – but turned on them soon after taking power. This about-face saw Amin align himself with Muammar Gaddafi to support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and thumb his nose at the west. By contrast, Museveni acceded to the neoliberal demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and signed on to the US’s “war on terror”, providing it crucial regional support in east Africa.View image in fullscreenBut Mamdani’s larger concern is with Museveni’s “continuous fragmentation of the subject population” of Uganda into ever smaller tribal divisions, with people designated “Indigenous” or “non-native” within ever smaller parcels of land. The 1993 Uganda Constitutional Commission defined “Indigenous” groups as those that could trace their presence in Uganda to three or four generations back and could also “indicate ancestral burial grounds and land within Uganda”; Museveni’s program of subdivision saw more and more Ugandans recast as “settlers” if they lived outside their assigned district – a designation that deprived them of the right to own land or hold high political office.Whereas Amin had united Uganda’s ethnic and linguistic groups into one racial category, Museveni has used those differences to fragment the populace and keep any threat to his power at bay. This process is the “slow poison” that Mamdani asserts is killing Uganda’s body politic.There is a clear connection between Mamdani’s appeal for a politics that respects cultural difference while preserving universal equal rights, and the campaign run by his son, who prevailed despite his steadfast refusal to support Israel’s political system, which denies equal rights to millions of Palestinians who are subject to its rule.“The challenge is how to reconcile cultural identity with political belonging, and a common past with a shared future,” Mamdani writes. “Not all who share a common past necessarily share a common future: some may migrate and become part of a diaspora. At the same time, people with different pasts can commit themselves to building a common future in the same place. This is why those who wish to build a future under a single political roof – no matter how different their pasts – belong to the same political community and thus deserve the same political rights.”A week after Zohran’s triumph in the New York City mayoral election signaled a new generation of Americans’ embrace of such universalist values, the elder Mamdani spoke with the Guardian about his history, his politics and his hopes for the future.The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.In your new book, you are asking people to reconsider Amin and the way that he has been portrayed as a kind of Hitler-esque figure. Why was it important to you to return to this history now?The western media in particular has been central to describing Amin as “the cannibal Amin”, etc – and without going to the other extreme of providing an apology [for Amin’s regime], as the Wall Street Journal thinks, I thought it was important to situate Amin in a context and to get a sense of him. Amin is trained as a child soldier by the British. He becomes a specialist in counter-terrorism, which is really a polite term for state terrorism.The worst of Amin’s killings, which are in the hundreds, and you might even say in the thousands, take place in the first year after he takes power. Those killings are informed, guided by the British and the Israelis. The British advise Amin to assassinate [then president Milton] Obote on arrival. The Israelis disagree. They say: “No, [if] you do that you will leave the military power structure intact, and there will be a reckoning down the road.” So Amin follows the Israeli advice and he carries out massacres in barracks. That’s Amin at his most brutal. [Note: estimates of Amin’s death toll range from 12,000 to 500,000; in Slow Poison, Mamdani argues that western sources inflated Amin’s brutality for political reasons.]View image in fullscreenAt the same time, Amin is disturbed at the general lawlessness spreading throughout the country, and appoints a commission of inquiry into disappearances. It’s the first truth commission that I know in the contemporary era. The commission recommends that the police take charge of civil order, and that army control of key institutions be negated.So that’s Amin: a complicated character. The shift between these two phases is informed by Amin’s understanding. After his first visits to Israel and London, it dawns on him that neither the British nor the Israelis take him seriously. They both think that he should be grateful and act as a stooge. That’s his big turning point. The British try to overthrow him. The Israelis try. The important point is that Amin becomes very popular in the country and the attempts to overthrow him from the outside do not work.Why is it important to scrutinize Israel’s role in this history?Israel’s role in Uganda in particular was critical. Israel cultivated Amin right from the beginning. Israel thought he would be their man. They built houses for him. They anointed him in Hebrew. They trained the forces which were central in making the coup. They advised him to use those forces and only those forces. They advised him on how to deal with the Obute military opposition.And then, of course, they were completely surprised when he [switched allegiances]. This is a very central role. This is not singling out Israel. If one didn’t talk of Israel, you would have no explanation of what happened.You describe Uganda under Museveni as a junior version of Israel. Can you explain what you mean?What I mean by junior version of Israel is a state which carries out, in particular, military missions in the region, in one country after another at the urging of or with the approval of the US, and in return gets a clean pass on everything else, and is guaranteed impunity. That’s Israel on a larger scale, and that’s Museveni on a regional scale.Many of us are accustomed to thinking of “Indigenous rights” as an important counterweight to the legacy of colonialism, but you have long questioned the meaningfulness of the distinction between “Indigenous” and non. Why is it important to you to interrogate the concept of Indigeneity as you think about who belongs in a political community?I first encountered this question in a book I wrote several decades ago called Citizen and Subject. I was puzzled by the political architecture that Britain created in its colonies to govern. The census tagged every person living in a colony as belonging either to a race or to a tribe, and I was curious: what’s the distinction? I realized that a race was anybody who had come from outside, who was not Indigenous, and a tribe was anybody who was Indigenous. So I asked myself: “What difference does it make?” Well, it made a difference in how they were governed under the law. All races, whether they came from Europe or from south Asia, anywhere, were governed under the same law, civil law. To be governed under the same law meant that you were supposed to have a common future.Tribes were not governed under the same law. First of all, there was the fiction that each tribe had a homeland. I call this a fiction because it’s not true. Before colonialism, not only Africans, but humans have been migrants. You cannot peg humans to a particular piece of territory over centuries and millennia. You can’t. They’ve moved. This fiction that every tribe had a homeland was extended so that every homeland had a customary authority. Cultural authorities were turned into political authorities. And then the British created something called customary law, which could be enforced by customary authorities with British power standing behind them. This made for a separate future for the tribes, unlike the races. I understood this to be the political, legal essence of what we normally call “divide and rule”.When I went to South Africa in 91, I was writing a book on Africa. Every chapter was written, except one chapter on south Africa, because south Africa was supposed to be the exception. Apartheid was supposed to be the exception. And after just a very little time in South Africa, I realized that I’d been totally mistaken. I’d been misled. South Africa was not an exception. I knew this beast. I had grown up under it in Uganda, although you may call it an informal version of apartheid. It was the same thing where the state used law to divide the population into different groups and privileged one section of the population at the expense of the other. I began to come to a conclusion that every modern colony was an apartheid state.The book deals with your personal history and how your identity cuts across the lines that have been drawn to divide groups for various reasons, whether as an Asian within Uganda or a Muslim from Gujarat in India. The policing of those lines was brought home in a particularly personal way this summer, when the New York Times ran an article seeking to scandalize the fact that your son had attempted to reflect his identity as African and Ugandan on his college application.I was pretty shocked to see that the Times had contacted you to ascertain whether you had any ancestry from Black Africans. It seemed to invoke the “one drop” rule of Blackness, which is very American, as well as Amin’s view that Asians are not really Ugandan. What did you make of that controversy? How do you see the policing of identity categories in the US compared to Uganda and other post-colonial states?In 2013 we formed an organization in Kampala called the Asian African Association. We said in our opening declaration Asian Africans are people whose past is Asian, but whose future is African. They are Africans of Asian descent. We said that in the past we had always lived as visitors, or even worse, as refugees, which meant that we had neither rights nor responsibilities. We were permanently on vacation or permanently entrepreneurs.The formation of this organization was part of a much larger quest which runs through African nationalist struggles, which was: who belongs? Who is part of the nation and who is not? The whole South African conception which ends with the notion of a non-racial South Africa – obliterating the boundary between Indigenous and non-Indigenous – is a fruit of that struggle, and it’s a legacy that we embraced.Now the New York Times – it was scandalous to me that they were resurrecting this dividing line between the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous, and that that line could only be crossed through miscegenation, blood mixing. It was shocking. I didn’t have to have any African ancestry, and yet, I thought of myself as a man from Africa. I was an African.I remember Thabo Mbeki’s speech in parliament defining who is an African. And I remember Afrikaner politicians standing up, one after another, each one saying, “I’m an African.” “I’m an African.” That was the fruit of the anti-apartheid struggle. The Times was so narrowly preoccupied with marginalizing one candidate that it seemed to have forgotten everything else.You wrote in the book that despite having been raised in a pretty segregated society in Kampala that your political awakening occurred in the US. What was it that you saw in the US that changed how you understood where you had come from?The big highlight was the civil rights movement and my going to the south, to the march on Montgomery. Then the anti-Vietnam war movement, and indirectly, through my girlfriends, the feminist movement. It was not an individual experience. There was a cultural revolution happening in the US. There was a wholly different mindset which was being born. Everybody I knew, more or less, shared this anti-racist orientation.When I went to Dar es Salaam, I was involved in an intellectual environment which gave me reasons for understanding this transformation and informed me of the larger anti-colonial movement, beginning with the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam Revolution, the Cuban Revolution.Today in New York – the New York experience keeps changing, and now with the election of my son as mayor, it’s changing even more. The sense of possibilities is broadening. I was quite surprised to see Zohran embrace where he came from openly and directly. “I’m a Muslim. I was born in Africa. I’m of south Asian descent,” and so on and so forth. New York continues to be a lived experience.At the same time we are seeing calls on the national level for mass deportation and efforts to carry out the expulsion of disfavored groups from the US. Do you see parallels with the expulsion of Uganda’s Asians?All the threads which led to the Asian expulsion in 1972 and, before that, the expulsion of the Luo [people], are present in the US now: birthright citizenship, Indigeneity. There are resonances, even similarities, but they’re not the same.The big difference, I think, is that there is a counterthrust here, and it’s just beginning. I think this election in New York City is a possible beginning. I don’t want to be too optimistic, but it’s a possible beginning because it’s had resonances, not just throughout the country, but even outside the country.View image in fullscreenCan you say a little bit more about that? My perception of Zohran’s campaign was that he spoke about universal values even as he celebrated in a very specific way his own identity and the identities of his supporters. It was a very different kind of politics than what we get from the Democratic party these days, which often seems to shy away from openly embracing immigrants or Muslims.I understand the contemporary situation in the US as being a product of decades-long encounters, which we call cultural wars, that were played out in the academy, in the intelligentsia. The key cultural war was around the notion of affirmative action. Should affirmative action be a temporary phase, or should it be a permanent phase? If it becomes a permanent phase, does not the quest of justice turn into revenge? Are you not holding children responsible for the deeds of their ancestors? If the children are going to be beneficiaries of the deeds of their ancestors, do they carry a measure of responsibility? I don’t think there is any clear-sightedness on whether affirmative action in the US should be permanent or not, but it’s a big issue, and it’s now coming to the fore.One of the ideas in the book that I was drawn to was the idea of federation – a system that “bases the notion of political belonging on where one lives rather than where one comes from”.My first encounter with the notion of federation was in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln and the amendments which changed the notion of citizenship. Before the civil war, you were a citizen of the state in which you were born. After the Civil war, you could be born in Alabama and move to California, and you would have the same rights as somebody born in California. This federal arrangement – a common citizenship, but not a centralized order – is under threat now. Both parts of it are under threat. Common citizenship is under threat and a federated [non-centralized] order is under threat, with Trump occupying cities with the national guard.In the African context, federation was always seen as a colonial maneuver. Federation was a name for emasculating the newly born independent governments and for empowering erstwhile privileged groups. But now federation is increasingly being embraced as part of an agenda against authoritarian regimes, dictatorial regimes, regimes like Musaveni’s.One theme of the book is how neoliberalism challenged and damaged Uganda’s university. How would you compare what happened there with the turmoil at Columbia in recent years? What do you make of the school’s capitulation to the Trump administration?There’s a definite connection. On the surface – not just superficially, but immediately – it is seen as an ideological confrontation, not as a confrontation about the structure of the university. But the background to 7 October 2023 and Minouche [Shafik’s] administration at Columbia was the [Lee] Bollinger era [from 2002 to 2023]. Bollinger brought about structural changes at Columbia. By the end of it, we got a bloated bureaucracy at the heart of which was the financial bureaucracy. That bureaucracy understood Colombia as a business enterprise with pluses and minuses, gains and losses. It was not really interested in Colombia as an academic institution.Minouche was brought here from the World Bank to [lead] that bureaucracy. She had no understanding of American academia. She had no experience in a large university. Poor Minouche comes and finds herself facing an encampment for which she was completely ill prepared.At the time we were blaming Minouche as the central character in what happened here. I now think that her lack of experience, her ignorance, was taken advantage of by others. She was more or less locked up in her office, and she resigned as an honorable way out, in a sense.She’s like an Idi Amin character; I’m trying to understand her. I’m not apologizing for her. If you print this, the Wall Street Journal will come back.Are you planning to return to campus to teach, given the systems that have been put in place to police the academic content of scholarship at Columbia?I’m definitely planning to come back and teach. I want to be involved in the kind of future we craft. I’m not willing to give up now.You were asked by Museveni to take an active role in his government on multiple occasions and declined. I was looking at the hardcover of Slow Poison last night and realized that you had added a final paragraph that wasn’t in the galley that addresses some of the complications that arise when intellectuals interact with power – the potential for corruption, the desire for “clean hands”. You end on an ambiguous note: “For now at least, we explore for an answer in the realm of practice.”Your son is going to be in power in New York City. Are you interested in playing a role in or influencing his administration?We have been very close as a family: Mira, Zohran and I. This book would have been like one of my other books, which is me standing at a distance and narrating what happened to others, not to me, but both Zohran and Mira kept telling me: “You have to insert yourself as a character in this. You were alive. You were involved. Take responsibility, but tell us. Tell us the part of the story which nobody else will be able to tell us.” So different versions of the book insert me more and more and compel me to understand the difference between the claim to objectivity and an understanding of positionality – that you are a limited witness who is looking at events from a particular vantage point, and that vantage point is both your strength and colors you.That ambiguity is an admission that I haven’t found an answer to the question. I don’t believe one should just stay away from power, but I don’t think we should embrace it. Power is a fatal thing for intellectuals. It corrupts intellectuals. I’ve seen many, many, many a friend get corrupted in the process.As to how I will relate to Zohran’s administration: I think initially at least both Mira and I will have the relationship we did during the campaign, which is to stay at an arm’s length but always be available. Always be available for discussion, for sharing our point of view, but not mistaking ourselves for being him. More

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    ‘Deeply ashamed’ Larry Summers steps back from public life over Epstein links

    The Harvard professor and economist Larry Summers said he would be stepping back from public life after documents released by the House oversight committee revealed email exchanges between Summers and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who called himself Summers’ “wing man”.Politico reported on Monday that Summers, a former treasury secretary, expressed deep regret for past messages with Epstein.“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” he told Politico in a statement.“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”The left-leaning thinktank Center for American Progress told the Guardian that Summers is ending his position as “distinguished senior fellow”.His comments come after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle urged companies and institutions to cut ties with Summers. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN that Summers should be held accountable for his years-long relationship with Epstein.Besides Summers, the emails released last week revealed how Epstein maintained contact with other business executives, reporters, academics and political players despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.“For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren said to CNN.“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers and institutions – or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”A senior Trump administration official told Politico that institutions should end their association with Summers, given the relationship he had with Epstein, who referred to himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man”.“It’s shocking that Larry Summers remains a paid contributor to Bloomberg News, on the board of OpenAI and tenured at Harvard,” the anonymous source told Politico. “What more revelations about him and his “wing man” will it take for institutions to cut him loose? The British government immediately sacked their ambassador to the US over much less.”Summers did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Summers is now the subject of a new investigation that Donald Trump started last week. The US president instructed attorney general Pam Bondi to launch an inquiry into several Democrats and institutions after their names appeared in the latest tranche of documents, which included emails that seemed to suggest Trump himself might have known about Epstein’s conduct.The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed Summers and Epstein sharing personal views about politics and relationships. Summers lost his position as president at Harvard in 2006 after making sexist comments about female academics, and the emails released last week have reignited debates about his relationship with the late sex offender.“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSummers added: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51% of population.”Other emails reveal Summers approached Epstein for romantic advice. In November 2018, Summers seemed to forward an email from a woman to ask for Epstein’s advice on when to write back.“Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers wrote. Epstein replied: “she’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.”Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson last week.“I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgment.”The college newspaper also reported that Harvard professors were outraged by the revelations made by the trove of emails released last week.“The cozy friendship between Epstein and Summers on display in the emails is disgusting and disgraceful,” statistics professor Joseph K Blitzstein told the Crimson.The relationship between Summers and Epstein was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2023. According to the outlet, in 2014, Summers had asked Epstein for advice on getting $1m in funding for his wife’s poetry project. More

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    Why are US border agents in Charlotte, and are they allowed to operate there?

    What is happening in Charlotte? North Carolina’s largest city is reeling from a series of immigration raids that have arrested more than 100 people, leading to alarm and protests.US Customs and Border Protection has called it Operation Charlotte’s Web, and border agents have been seen near churches, apartment complexes and stores. Greg Bovino, a hardline Border Patrol chief who has led agents in a similar effort in Chicago and Los Angeles, has also been spotted.Over the weekend, Bovino – known for posting highly stylized videos of enforcement actions – touted his work on X. “From border towns to the Queen City, our agents go where the mission calls,” he said, referring to Charlotte.Josh Stein, the governor of North Carolina, has criticized the crackdown as simply “stoking fear”.Why are we seeing more border agents in US cities?Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which encompasses the Border Patrol, is about 60,000 agents strong – making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.The department has long had the authority to conduct patrols further inland, but it has until recently been highly uncommon to see agents stray far from the south-western border. During Donald Trump’s second term, however, agents have become ubiquitous foot soldiers in the administration’s mass deportation agenda.Under a 1946 statute, Border Patrol agents have the ability to conduct warrantless searches within a “reasonable distance” – or up to 100 miles – from any international boundaries. Those boundaries include international land borders as well as coastlines – so in effect, their range encapsulates most US major cities, including LA, New York and Washington DC. Cities such as Chicago falls within this 100-mile zone, because the Great Lakes are considered a maritime boundary.Nearly two-thirds of the US population lives within the zone.Can Border Patrol operate in places such as Charlotte that are not near the border? The short answer is yes.That’s according to Deborah Anthony, a professor of legal studies at the University of Illinois Springfield with an expertise in constitutional law and the legality of Border Patrol operations. She clarifies that within 100 miles of an international border or US coastline, Border Patrol operates with expanded authority that other law enforcement agencies do not have. Within that perimeter, agents can run immigration checkpoints that require every motorist to stop, even without reasonable suspicion, and can board buses, for example, for immigration inquiries.But once agents are outside the 100-mile perimeter, Border Patrol loses those exemptions and must follow the same constitutional limits as any other law enforcement agency. For instance, agents cannot indiscriminately stop cars or pedestrians or set up checkpoints.They also cannot detain or question people without reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation. To arrest or detain someone, Border Patrol agents would need probable cause, just like any other law enforcement agency. Therefore, if agents in Charlotte conduct stops, detain people without cause, or operate checkpoints inland without reasonable suspicion, that is technically a violation of the constitution.“I think that their presence in Charlotte is something that the community should pay close attention to, because whether they’re operating legally depends on the specifics of how things are playing out,” Anthony said.Who is Greg Bovino, the border chief in charge of these efforts? Until recently, he was an unheralded regional Border Patrol agent from southern California. But since the summer, Bovino, 55, has become the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and now Charlotte.View image in fullscreenBovino, a 29-year Border Patrol veteran who formally headed the El Centro sector in southern California, has frequently broadcast his operations in social media videos that resembles action films.Bovino is not without controversy: he has come under fire for making misleading statements about immigration raids, and Border Patrol operations in Chicago and Los Angeles have triggered lawsuits over the use of force, including widespread deployment of chemical agents.Last month, a federal judge ordered Bovino to regularly appear in court with updates about operations in the city, an effort to create more oversight over the Trump administration’s militarized immigration crackdown. Bovino was also ordered to get a body camera and complete training on the use of a body camera.In August, the New York Times reported that two undocumented people died trying to flee from Bovino’s agents. A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a raid at a Home Depot.What does Border Patrol say about the scope of its operations? In response to questions from the Guardian about Border Patrol’s operations in Charlotte, DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “While the US Border Patrol primarily operates within 100 air miles of the border, the legal framework provided by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), title 8, title 19 of the US Code, and other laws allows them to operate anywhere in the United States.”She added: “Their ability to operate nationwide ensures Border Patrol can enforce immigration laws, combat smuggling and address national security threats anywhere in the United States, and that immigration enforcement is not limited to border regions when individuals who evade detection at the border can still be apprehended.”Lawyers and human rights advocates, however, have said that the agents, who are trained to block illegal entries, drug smugglers and human traffickers at the country’s borders, may be ill-suited to conduct civil immigration enforcement in urban communities.“The Border Patrol is certainly quite cavalier, and has been very aggressive historically as it goes about its enforcement responsibilities,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, previously told the Guardian.Robert Tait and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    US unveils World Cup visa system but warns fans could still be denied entry

    The Trump administration on Monday unveiled a new fast-track visa system for the millions of visitors expected to come to the US for the 2026 World Cup, but said fans could still be denied entry to the country despite holding tickets.The Fifa prioritized appointment scheduling system, announced at the White House on Monday, will push World Cup ticket-holders to the front of the line for visa interviews. However, secretary of state Marco Rubio made clear that expedited processing does not mean automatic entry.“Your ticket is not a visa. It doesn’t guarantee admission to the US,” Rubio said. “It guarantees you an expedited appointment. You’re still going to go through the same vetting. We’re going to do the same vetting as anybody else would get. The only difference here is we’re moving them up in the queue.”The warning suggests non-American citizens within the roughly million people who have already bought tickets could find themselves barred from entering the country despite holding valid match passes and securing faster appointment slots.Fifa president Gianni Infantino said World Cup officials would eventually sell up to 6 to 7 million tickets and told reporters in the Oval Office “we’ll have between five and 10 million people coming to America from all over the world”.So far, most demand has been domestic: the US, Mexico and Canada will be co-hosting the tournament next June and make up the majority of ticket holders. But Fifa said people from 212 different countries and territories have also already bought their tickets.To handle the surge in applications, Rubio said the state department has deployed more than 400 additional consular officers worldwide, in some cases doubling embassy staff. The measures have already slashed visa wait times from up to a year to 60 days or less in approximately 80% of countries, according to Rubio.“In places, for example, like Brazil and Argentina, you would have [had] over a year to get an appointment. Now you can get [one] in less than two months,” Rubio said.Separately, Trump threatened to relocate matches from host cities he deems problematic, singling out Seattle and its new democratic socialist mayor. The city is scheduled to host six games.“If we think there’s going to be the sign of any trouble, I would ask [Fifa president] Gianni [Infantino] move that to a different city. We have a lot of cities that would love to have it,” Trump said. “If we think there’s a problem in Seattle where you have a very, very liberal-slash-communist mayor … we’re going to move the event to some place where it’s going to be appreciated and safe.”The president said he would be willing to deploy the national guard to Los Angeles, another host city, citing concerns with crime and demanding California officials request federal assistance immediately.“I would love to send in [the] national guard, or whoever’s necessary to help them,” Trump said. “If there’s even a hint of a problem, we want to get in there before the problem. We want to make it totally safe for [Infantino] and Fifa and all the great people that are going to be there.”Trump called the tournament a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for the country. The US previously hosted the World Cup in 1994. The 2026 edition kicks off in the summer, and will be the first to feature 48 teams, expanded from the traditional 32. More