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    Why are people so triggered by the Mexican flag at the LA protests? | Daniel Peña

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    Republicans are using images of Ice protesters waving Mexican flags atop burning Waymo cars to foment fear among Americans. Like this photograph that Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday: a shirtless protester wielding the Tricolor atop a vandalized robotaxi as flames billow toward the weak sunlight backlighting the flag. His dark curls fall to his bare shoulders. He stares into the camera.Frankly, the image belongs in a museum.I understand my reaction is not the feeling Republicans hope to inspire in Americans broadly this week. Their messaging thus far about the protests against immigration raids in Latino communities has largely been alarmist – proof, they say, of an “invasion” of “illegal aliens”.“Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory,” said Stephen Miller on X. According to Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman and more moderate voice, the Mexican flags carried by protesters are “terrible … and feeding right into Donald Trump’s narrative”.“I just think that it would be much stronger if they were carrying American flags only,” he said on CNN this week.By this logic, Mexican flags are proof-positive that Mexican Americans are not really American; that we are somehow collaborating on a planned “invasion”; that we harbor secret loyalties to Mexico; that we’re here to displace white people and undermine the American way of life via some Plan de Aztlan. In short, none of this is true.View image in fullscreenIn front of Congress Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, cited the presence of “flags from foreign countries” in LA to legitimize supporting Trump’s deployment of the national guard. This unilateral invocation of Title 10 by the Trump administration, without the consent of the governor, is exceedingly aggressive. So is the deployment of 700 US marines to be used to crush American protest in an American city.The subtext here is that by many metrics, Americans’ patience for Ice and its antics is wearing thin, even as Ice’s deportation numbers are anemic compared with past administrations. The Trump administration realizes something has to change. Fanning outrage about a flag is both a legal pretext to pursue martial law and a diplomatic means of getting consent from the American populace to do unpopular things in the name of security.But what is it about the Mexican flag that triggers so many people?I’d argue that in the American context, the Mexican flag is not a nationalist symbol but something decentered from Mexico as a nation-state. Historically, it was a key banner of the Chicano movement, flown by supporters surrounding Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez during the California grape boycott in the 1960s. It flew alongside the United Farm Workers flag, the American flag and banners of the Virgen de Guadalupe as a means of fomenting cultural unity. It also served as a reminder of a fundamental truth: we are from here; we are also from there. We’re children of the in-between, or what the Tejana writer Gloria Anzaldúa referred to as nepantla in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera. Nepantla is simply Nahuatl for the liminal space between cultures, identities and worlds. To this end, we might think of the Mexican flag as a symbol of double-consciousness in the Mexican American psyche specifically. We understand our middleness, yet we also understand how America sees and defines us: Mexicans. We take that prejudice and transform it into power.It’s through this lens that I see the Mexican flag as just one banner among many, a remembrance of roots but also a shared experience between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants alike. Night after night, you can see captivating scenes with Mexican flags flying in the downtowns of Dallas and Houston and Atlanta and New York, as a solidarity grows between those explicitly targeted by Ice and those soon-to-be targeted by Ice. This is not hyperbole. Today, phenotype and politics are grounds enough for detention: in order for Ice to meet the Trump administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day, targets have increasingly included student protesters, tourists and even American citizens. The only rule is to meet the metric at all costs.Amid these burgeoning protests, the Mexican flag is a bold articulation: we are like you; you are like us. We have struggled and persist in this place together. See me and don’t be afraid; I see you and I am not afraid. To wield the flag amid a protest is to paint yourself a target, to take both your body and your future into your own hands. This is precisely why the marines have been called in. To intimidate these bodies. Or to destroy them.What Trump fails to realize is that the bones of Mexican people are the metadata of the land in California and indeed the rest of the country. Our place here is in the food, in the street names, in the name of Los Angeles itself.Already, I can hear some within my own community admonishing my defense of Mexican flags at American protests as treasonous or ungrateful or something along those lines. To them I might ask: why is it that the protesters’ allegiances are held to higher standards than an American president who seeks to turn the US armed forces against American citizens?From Republican leaders, ​you’ll never hear such questioning rhetoric surrounding other foreign flags that fly prominently in America. The Irish flag on St Patrick’s Day instantly comes to mind. As does the Israeli flag at both political and non-political events. And, of course, the Confederate flag, though white supremacists have explicitly stated goals of both overthrowing the US government and taking back US land. Heritage is the most commonly used defense. Though wouldn’t heritage apply to the Mexican flag as well?View image in fullscreenI’m reminded of James Baldwin when Mexicans Americans and Mexicans call for restraint from using Mexican imagery in US protests: “In Harlem,” Baldwin wrote, “… the Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.” We think our respectability will protect us. But we know historically and empirically that has not been true. Respectability did not protect Japanese Americans from being interned. Nor did it protect Vietnamese veterans who fought alongside Americans in Vietnam from facing discrimination in the US. Nor did it protect Afghan translators from having their visas revoked.Our American bona fides are not the things that will save us now. Not in the era of detention metrics and collateral targeting and now the prospect of authoritarian violence.It should be said: I don’t go looking for these images. For my sins, having clicked on one, the algorithm floods me with them now. Protesters with Mexican flags getting a haircut in front of police. Protesters with Mexican flags forming a human chain. They just keep coming to me. But other images, too. Like one of a guy popping a wheelie past a ton of burning Waymo cars. I mean, come the fuck on – it’s cool. The thing that immediately jumps out to me is the frivolity of the image. A body perfectly in balance, perfectly in motion. It moves of its own volition. It is completely in command of its trajectory and space in the landscape.It is beyond the fascist impulse to live so beautifully as this. Luckily, it also is beyond the fascist ability to remove the memory of this body from the land. More

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      Yes, protesting can help tyrants like Trump, with its scenes of disorder. But that’s no reason to stay at home | Zoe Williams

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      When Donald Trump was elected the first time round, the works of the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt flew off the shelves in the US. It wasn’t all good news – JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was also enjoying a surge in popularity and Trump was, of course, still about to be president. But Arendt’s famous 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was selling at 16 times its usual rate, which meant that by the time of the protests centred on the inauguration in January 2017, at least some of those people had read it.Arendt’s view of popular demonstrations was complicated. She wasn’t blind to the way authoritarian rulers use public protest as an excuse for a display of physical power, embodied in the police, which turns the state into an army against its people, altering that relationship. If it’s no longer government by consent, it’s rule by force, and they have the equipment. Yet “how many people here still believe”, she wrote of Germany in the 1930s, quoting the French activist David Rousset, “that a protest has even historic importance? This scepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future.” It’s an elegantly drawn lose-lose situation: if you lose the will to protest, you have been “morally murdered”, but if you don’t, you play into the tyrant’s hands.But the Women’s Marches of January 2017 didn’t spark police violence. Not a single arrest was made across the 2 million protesters gathered in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. Commentators wondered whether this was due to the essentially peaceable nature of women and their allies, while academics drew comparisons with the hundreds of arrests made during the Ferguson uprising of 2014 (which, of course, happened under President Obama). “Tanks and rubber bullets versus pussy-hats and high-fives” was how one scholar, Abby Harrington, described the contrast, making the case convincingly that protesters were treated differently on essentially racist grounds. It would be wrong, and actually quite sexist, to say that the women weren’t considered worthy of violent suppression because they didn’t seem serious enough. It would be wrong, too, to say that they made no impact – they were enormous, dispersed across 408 places in the US, rallying by some estimates more than 4 million Americans, and spawning protests in solidarity across seven continents, including one in Antarctica.The demand was very broad and consequently pretty loose, however: protesters wanted “vibrant and diverse communities” recognised as “the strength of our country”. They wanted reproductive rights and tolerance and protection from violence; mutual respect; racial equality; gender equality; workers’ rights – it was a call for decency, to which the leader felt no need to respond, almost by definition, since he is not decent.The recent US protests were sparked last Friday at about 9am, as border patrol agents massed outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a predominantly Latino area in Los Angeles. An assembly member, José Luis Solache Jr, happened to be driving past, so stopped and posted the scenes, which looked chillingly militaristic even days before the arrival of the national guard. Protesters started to arrive, not in huge numbers but with a vast purpose – to prevent what looked like an immigration raid of people trying to do their jobs. It came on the back of the arrest of a senior union official in the Fashion District, and one father arrested in front of his eight-year-old son. The message, when border guards sweep a workplace or a courtroom where people are doing regular immigration check-ins, is quite plain: this isn’t about deporting hardened criminals.The protestrs’ demand was correlatively plain: don’t arrest our friends, neighbours or colleagues, when they pose no danger to anyone. Since then, 700 marines have been deployed to the city, and the number of national guards doubled to 4,000. The situation recalls Arendt’s later work, On Violence, in which she argues that power and violence are actually opposites – the state creates tinderbox situations when it has lost the expectation of public compliance. So if the protests were symbolic, they would be playing into the government’s hands: an abstract resistance creating justification for concrete suppression. But the protests are not symbolic – the alternative to protesting against a raid by border guards is to let the raid go ahead and lose those neighbours.The Russian-American columnist and author M Gessen cites a distinction made in political science between faith, where you believe that justice will simply prevail, and hope, where you observe and participate. Gessen wrote in the New York Times: “You can’t take action without hope, but you also can’t have hope without taking action.” Everyone has a line over which they’d be spurred to action – there’s no one who wouldn’t lie down in front of the government van if their child were kidnapped and put inside it by masked men. So the real art of the autocratic state is not just to weaken protective institutions, but also to foster the conditions of fear and hopelessness ahead of a critical mass finding its hard limit. It’s not clear, yet, whether the repression is a deliberate spectacle in order to create that fear, or whether, conversely, it’s the accidental creation of conditions that demand action.

      Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      US immigration officials raid California farms as Trump ramps up conflict

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      US immigration officials carried out further “enforcement activity” in California’s agricultural heartland and the Los Angeles area as the conflict between the state and Donald Trump’s administration intensified on Wednesday.Immigrant advocacy groups reported multiple actions across the state, where an estimated 255,700 farm workers are undocumented, and said agents pursued workers through blueberry fields and staged operations at agricultural facilities.The raids have been sharply criticized by advocacy groups and local officials, who said they were “outraged and heartbroken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) activities targeting immigrant families”.“When our workforce’s lives are in fear, the fields will go unharvested, the impact is felt not only at the local level, but it will also be felt at the national level,” said Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios, the mayor of Ventura, a coastal city just north of Los Angeles. “Everything will be affected and every American who is here and relies on the labor of these individuals will be affected.”Immigration activities have continued in the Los Angeles area as well, where officials say people have been detained outside Home Depots and in front of churches. Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, said the raids have created a deep sense of fear in the region and that the White House has provoked unrest. The nighttime curfew she put in place this week will stay in place as long as needed, including while there are ongoing raids and a military presence in the city, Bass said at a press conference on Wednesday.Hilda Solis, an LA county supervisor, said Wednesday evening she was concerned about a “deeply disturbing incident” in the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood involving two unmarked vehicles operated by Ice agents crashing in to a civilian car with two children inside and deploying teargas to apprehend an individual. She said she had also learned of an incident of Ice attempting to detain a member of the press.The nearly 5,000 US military personnel in the city now exceeds the number of US troops in both Iraq and Syria.The increasing raids come as Ice ramps up its efforts to meet a reported quota of 3,000 detentions a day set by Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. The city has seen days of protest over Trump’s immigration crackdown and the subsequent military deployment.Los Angeles police announced they arrested more than 200 people in the city’s downtown area on Tuesday, after crowds gathered in defiance of the overnight curfew in the neighborhood. The LAPD said it had carried out more than 400 arrests and detentions of protesters since Saturday.The crackdown came after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, filed an emergency request to block the Trump administration from using military forces to accompany Ice officers on raids throughout LA.Trump has ordered the deployment of 4,000 national guard members and 700 marines to LA after days of protests driven by anger over aggressive Ice raids that have targeted garment workers, day labourers, car wash employees and members of immigrant communities.Across the country, NBC reported that Ice was preparing to deploy tactical units to several more cities run by Democratic leaders, citing two sources familiar with the plans, who named four of the cities as Seattle, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.On Wednesday, dozens of mayors from across the Los Angeles region banded together to demand that the Trump administration stop the stepped-up immigration raids that have spread fear across their cities.“I’m asking you, please listen to me, stop terrorizing our residents,” said Mayor Jessica Ancona of El Monte, who said she was hit by rubber bullets during a raid in her city.Speaking alongside the other mayors at a news conference, Bass said the raids spread fear at the behest of the White House.“We started off by hearing the administration wanted to go after violent felons, gang members, drug dealers. But when you raid Home Depots and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart, and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you’re not trying to keep anyone safe,” she said. “You’re trying to cause fear and panic.”Newsom and the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, have alleged in a pair of lawsuits filed on Monday and Tuesday that Trump’s takeover of the state’s national guard, against the governor’s wishes, was unlawful. On Tuesday, a federal judge declined to immediately rule on California’s request for a restraining order and scheduled a hearing for Thursday.In a speech, Newsom condemned Trump for “indiscriminately targeting hard-working immigrant families” and militarising the streets of LA, recounting how in recent days Ice agents had grabbed people outside a Home Depot, detained a nine-months-pregnant US citizen, sent unmarked cars to schools, and arrested gardeners and seamstresses.“That’s just weakness masquerading as strength,” the governor said. “If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant based only on suspicion or skin colour, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.”In past days, thousands of troops have been deployed to LA over the objections of Democratic officials and despite concerns from local law enforcement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUS military troops in the city do not have the authority to arrest people, but they are allowed to temporarily detain individuals until law enforcement agents arrest them, Maj Gen Scott Sherman, who is leading the deployment, said on Wednesday. National guard troops on the ground in Los Angeles have already done so, he said.View image in fullscreenThe 700 US marines who will be deployed are receiving training on civil disturbances and will not have live ammunition in their rifles while in the city, Sherman said.The Los Angeles county sheriff, Robert Luna, said on Wednesday, however, that federal troops do not have the power to arrest or detain: “So if they are out in the field, they may be there, but they are working in conjunction with federal authorities. It could be Ice, border patrol, there’s a whole host of acronym federal agencies that they’re working with.” Luna also said he was unaware whether Marines were already on the ground in the city, but that local law enforcement was trying to “improve communication” with the military.Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said he expected the military would remain in the city for 60 days at a cost of at least $134m.Trump defended the military deployment on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday morning, writing: “If our troops didn’t go into Los Angeles, it would be burning to the ground right now, just like so much of their housing burned to the ground. The great people of Los Angeles are very lucky that I made the decision to go in and help!!!”The deployment of the national guard and marines is strongly opposed by California Democrats, as well as by every Democratic governor in the US. Alex Padilla, a California senator, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that protests against Ice and the subsequent legal showdown between his state and the government was “absolutely a crisis of Trump’s own making”.He said: “There are a lot of people who are passionate about speaking up for fundamental rights and respecting due process, but the deployment of national guard only serves to escalate tensions and the situation. It’s exactly what Donald Trump wanted to do.”Padilla said the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had not been advised of the federalisation of the national guard. He said his office had pressed the Pentagon for a justification, and “as far as we’re told, the Department of Defence isn’t sure what the mission is here”.Meanwhile, officials in Los Angeles have sought to reassure the public that the situation in the city remains largely peaceful and calm. At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Nathan Hochman, the district attorney of Los Angeles county, pointed out how images of unrest on television and social media have misled many Americans about the nature and scale of the mayhem.“If you only saw the social media and the media reports of what’s going on over the last five days, you would think that Los Angeles is on the brink of war,” Hochman said.“But let me put this in perspective for you. There are 11 million people in this county; 4 million of which live in Los Angeles city. We estimate that there’s probably thousands of people who have engaged in legitimate protest, let’s say 4,000 people,” Hochman said.“That means that 99.9% of people in Los Angeles city or generally Los Angeles county have not engaged in any protest at all,” he continued. “Now, amongst the people who have engaged in protest, we estimate that there are hundreds of people, let’s say maybe up to 400, to use rough percentages, who have engaged in this type of illegal activity.”“So what does that mean?” Hochman asked. “That means that 99.99% of people who live in Los Angeles … have not committed any illegal acts in connection with this protest whatsoever.”Lauren Gambino, Sam Levin, Lois Beckett, Joseph Gedeon and agencies contributed reporting More

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      Trump trade deal shows how vital China’s rare-earth metals are to US defense firms

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      The draft trade agreement with China announced by Donald Trump on Wednesday would ease concerns from top US military suppliers about rare-earth metals and magnets that, if cut off permanently, could hobble production of everything from smart bombs to fighter jets to submarines and other weapons in the US arsenal.While the deal has not yet been finalised, it may reassure major defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, the largest US user of samarium – a rare-earth metal used in military-grade magnets – whose supply is entirely controlled by China.The issue of China’s export restrictions on the metals and magnets was so important that Trump specifically mentioned them as part of his announcement of a broader trade agreement with China that would reduce US tariffs to 55% and Chinese tariffs to 10%.“Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me,” Trump wrote. “Full magnets, and any necessary rare earths, will be supplied, up front, by China.”Rare earths are crucial to the production of F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and smart bombs, according to Gracelin Baskaran of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank.China in April imposed export restrictions on seven rare earth elements during the tough negotiations over Trump’s new tariffs. China also targeted the aerospace and defense industries by limiting 15 US entities with ties to the industry from receiving dual-use goods.“The United States is already on the back foot when it comes to manufacturing these defense technologies,” Baskaran said in an interview published by CSIS. “China is rapidly expanding its munitions production and acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the United States. While China is preparing with a wartime mindset, the United States continues to operate under peacetime conditions.”Trump has amassed a team of foreign policy China hawks, including a number who have warned that the US should focus more on the pacing threat posed by China over the coming decades instead of current conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East.“Even before the latest restrictions, the US defense industrial base struggled with limited capacity and lacked the ability to scale up production to meet defense technology demands,” she continued. “Further bans on critical minerals inputs will only widen the gap, enabling China to strengthen its military capabilities more quickly than the United States.”China and the US had agreed last month in Geneva to pause the implementation of sky-high tariffs that would have delivered a severe economic blow to manufacturers and consumers in the US, as well as exporters in China.But China maintained export licenses on rare-earth metals used by both defense producers and carmakers that threatened to upend global supply chains and imperil production in the US.In particular, China has a stranglehold on the production and export of samarium, a magnet used in combination with cobalt to provide highly durable magnets used to withstand the intense temperatures in military-grade tech. China produces the entire world’s supply of the rare-earth metal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn particular, the magnets are important for the production of guided missiles, satellite-guided “smart bombs”, and aircrafts, including fighter jets, according to Apex Magnets, a supplier.Those supplies of weapons have been depleted through deliveries of missiles and other ordnance to Ukraine and to the Israeli military. Pentagon planners and other officials in the administration of Joe Biden, regularly squared off over whether foreign weapons deliveries expose a US vulnerability in case it faced off with a major military power.In order to break the deadlock, secretary of state Marco Rubio also abruptly announced plans to cancel hundreds of thousands of visas for Chinese students in the US. While publicly that was said as a plan to root out Chinese spies in US higher education, Axios reported that the visa ban was also motivated by China’s obstinance on resuming rare earths exports.The breakthrough comes as Trump is planning to display US military prowess at a parade in Washington DC this weekend that has been seen as an attempt to flex American muscle and reinforce the US president’s bonafides as a supporter of the military.Trump in 2019 ordered the Pentagon to find new sources of procuring rare earth minerals, in particular samarium, because the US did not have the capacity to produce them domestically. The initiative was “essential to the national defense”, he said then. More

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      Trump administration urges other countries to skip UN conference on Israel-Gaza war

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      Donald Trump’s administration is discouraging governments around the world from attending a UN conference next week on a possible two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, according to a US cable seen by Reuters.The diplomatic demarche, sent on Tuesday, says countries that take “anti-Israel actions” following the conference will be viewed as acting in opposition to US foreign policy interests and could face diplomatic consequences from Washington.The demarche runs squarely against the diplomacy of two close allies, France and Saudi Arabia, who are co-hosting the gathering next week in New York that aims to lay out the parameters for a roadmap to a Palestinian state, while ensuring Israel’s security.“We are urging governments not to participate in the conference, which we view as counterproductive to ongoing, life-saving efforts to end the war in Gaza and free hostages,” read the cable.Emmanuel Macron has suggested France could recognise a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territories at the conference. French officials say they have been working to avoid a clash with the US, Israel’s staunchest major ally.“The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognise a conjectural Palestinian state, which adds significant legal and political obstacles to the eventual resolution of the conflict and could coerce Israel during a war, thereby supporting its enemies,” the cable read.The United States for decades backed a two-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians that would create a state for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel.Trump, in his first term, was relatively tepid in his approach to a two-state solution, a longtime pillar of US Middle East policy. The Republican president has given little sign of where he stands on the issue in his second term.But on Tuesday, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a long-time vocal supporter of Israel, said he did not think an independent Palestinian state remained a US foreign policy goal.“Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state would effectively render Oct 7 Palestinian Independence Day,” the cable read, referring to when Palestinian Hamas militants carried out a cross-border attack from Gaza on Israel in 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.Hamas’ attack triggered Israel’s air and ground war in Gaza in which almost 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of the population of 2.3 million displaced and the enclave widely reduced to rubble.If Macron went ahead, France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities, would become the first Western heavyweight to recognise a Palestinian state.This could lend greater momentum to a movement hitherto dominated by smaller nations generally more critical of Israel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMacron’s stance has shifted amid Israel’s intensified Gaza offensive and escalating violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, and there is a growing sense of urgency in Paris to act now before the idea of a two-state solution vanishes forever.The US cable said Washington had worked tirelessly with Egypt and Qatar to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, free the hostages and end the conflict.“This conference undermines these delicate negotiations and emboldens Hamas at a time when the terrorist group has rejected proposals by the negotiators that Israel has accepted.”This week the UK, Australia and Canada were joined by other countries in placing sanctions on two Israeli far-right government ministers to pressure Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, to bring the Gaza war to an end.“The United States opposes the implied support of the conference for potential actions including boycotts and sanctions on Israel as well as other punitive measures,” the cable read.Israel has repeatedly criticised the conference, saying it rewards Hamas for the attack on Israel, and it has lobbied France against recognising a Palestinian state.“Nothing surprises me anymore, but I don’t see how many countries could step back on their participation,” said a European diplomat, who asked for anonymity due to the subject’s sensitivity. “This is bullying, and of a stupid type.“ More

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      World’s biggest TikTok star Khaby Lame leaves US after Ice agents detain him over visa

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      The world’s most followed TikToker, Khaby Lame, has left the US after being briefly detained by immigration agents for allegedly overstaying his visa. The Italian-Senegalese influencer is now one of the most high-profile people to be swept up in Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration.The social media star, whose legal name is Seringe Khabane Lame, was detained last Friday at an airport in Las Vegas. He was released the same day and has since left the US, a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) told the Guardian in a statement.The spokesperson said Lame, had arrived in the US on 30 April and alleged that the influencer had “overstayed the terms of his visa”.Trump’s escalating crackdown on immigration continues to roil the country as agents intensify operations to carry out the US president’s hardline promises. In recent days, raids have triggered protests in Los Angeles and other cities amid concerns the focus has shifted to a broader sweep of people who are not US citizens, including some who have valid documentation such as green cards or visas.US immigration officials said that Lame, who is a Unicef goodwill ambassador and has a following of more than 162 million on TikTok, “has since departed the US”. He had been granted a voluntary departure, allowing him to avoid having a deportation order – which could have resulted in him being barred from the US for up to a decade – on his record.Bo Loudon, an 18-year-old who describes himself as a “pro-Trump influencer” on his website, claimed he had been the one to flag Lame’s case to officials.“I discovered that he was an illegal,” Loudon, who has also claimed to be the best friend of Trump’s son Barron, wrote on social media. “And I personally took action to have him deported.”Loudon repeated the claim in other posts, saying he had worked with immigration officials and the Department of Homeland Security to have Lame removed.According to the US visa waiver program, Italian citizens are allowed to travel to the US for business or tourism for stays of up to 90 days without a visa.Lame entered the US on 30 April, Ice said. A spokesperson from Ice told the Guardian that the information “provided is all the information we have available”.Lame did not reply to a request for comment from the Guardian, nor has he publicly commented on the incident.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLame, 25, began posting on TikTok after he lost his job working in a factory in Chivasso, a suburb of Turin, in the early days of the pandemic. He began racking up millions of followers, who revelled in his often-silent videos that offer humorous takedowns of online absurdity, alongside his trademark facial expressions.In 2022, he became the most followed creator on TikTok, catapulting him to international fame and landing him marketing deals with companies and a spot at events such as last month’s Met Gala in New York City.Lame, who was born in Senegal but has lived in Italy since he was a year old, was granted Italian citizenship in August 2022. More

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      Majority of Canadians dislike US in face of trade policy and sovereignty threats

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      A majority of Canadians hold unfavourable views towards the US, their closest ally, as frustration over trade policy and threats to Canada’s sovereignty persist.Canada’s growing dislike of its closest trading partner mirrors a shared skepticism in other G7 countries, according to a new poll that finds that Americans like their allies far more than those nations approve of the US.The results come as Canadians maintain boycotts of American goods and avoid travel to the US in response to tariffs imposed by Donald Trump’s administration. But the results of the survey also show the challenge for Mark Carney as the Canadian prime minister seeks to ease tensions between the two economically entwined nations.According to the newly released study from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans see the other G7 countries favourably. More than seven in 10 have positive views of Japan (77%), Canada (74%), Italy (74%) and the UK (70%).Those finds come as leaders from those nations prepare to meet in the Canadian province of Alberta later this week for the G7 summit.But those feelings of goodwill are not reciprocated.Populations in all of the G7 countries hold more skeptical views towards the US, with the largest decrease in favorability toward the US among G7 countries coming from Canada. Only one-third of Canadians (34%) think positively of their southern neighbour today, compared with 54% last year.Sixty-four percent of Canadians now hold unfavourable views of the US, and nearly 40% say they hold very unfavourable views of their neighbour, up from 15% who felt that way last year.Canadian wariness towards the US is also reflected in new travel data from Statistics Canada, which found return trips by air fell nearly 25% in May 2025 compared with the same month in 2024. Canadian-resident return trips by automobile dropped by nearly 40% – the fifth consecutive month of year-over-year declines.Carney crafted his successful federal election campaign around a patriotic defiance against Trump’s threats to the nation’s sovereignty. Carney also used his first post-election press conference to once again quash any idea Canada was interested in becoming the 51st US state, a proposal repeatedly floated by Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA positive meeting between the two leaders at the White House in May buoyed hopes among business leaders and diplomats the pair could break the impasse over tariffs. Those fears were dashed after Trump doubled tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.Earlier this week, Carney announced Canada would spend far more on its defence budget – a key ask of Trump – while at the same time underscoring his government’s pledge to reduce reliance on the US.“We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the cold war and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a dominant role on the world stage,” he said. “Today, that dominance is a thing of the past.” More

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      Protests across US as anger grows over Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Protests against the Trump administration’s newly intensified immigration raids, centered on Los Angeles, spread across the country on Tuesday, with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.Thousands attended a protest against the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in New York City’s Foley Square.Some protesters held signs reading “Ice out of New York” and others chanted “Why are you in riot gear? I don’t see no riot here.”Shirley, a 29-year-old protester, condemned the Trump administration for targeting workers, which she called antithetical to the country’s essence.“I come from immigrant parents,” she said, with a large Mexican flag draped across her back. “It’s infuriating to see that this particular government is going into labor fields, taking people from construction sites, into industry, plants, into farms, and taking away what is the backbone of this country.“So I’m here today to remind everybody that the United States started as an immigrant country, and it’s a nation of immigrants, and I just want to make sure that I’m here for those who can’t be here today.”Councilmember Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn spoke before the large crowd in Foley Square. She criticized the Trump administration and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, for the crackdown on immigrants.“Mayor Adams has made it clear that he doesn’t care about working class people,” she said. “He does not care about any one of us. He is collaborating with Trump to use tactics. He’s complicit.”She also expressed her desire to keep New York a sanctuary city, and called for more protections for international students.“Stop the attacks and assaults on our students!” she yelled, and was met with cheers from the crowd.Thousands also gathered outside an immigration court in Chicago, and then marched through downtown streets, drumming and chanting, “No more deportations!”View image in fullscreenAt one point, a car drove through the marchers, narrowly missing the anti-Ice protesters, according to WGN TV News, which broadcast video of the incident.In metro Atlanta, hundreds of people marched along Buford Highway in solidarity with Los Angeles, local 11 Alive News reported.Protesters marched in Omaha on Tuesday, chanting “Chinga la migra” (a Spanish phrase that roughly translates to the slogan “Fuck Ice” on placards waved by the marchers) after about 80 people were reportedly arrested in an immigration raid on a meat-packing plant.In Seattle, a small crowd of about 50 protesters gathered outside the Henry M Jackson federal building in downtown Seattle to show solidarity with protesters in Los Angeles, the Seattle Times reported.After a rally, the protesters barricaded driveways with e-bikes and e-scooters to block homeland security vehicles thought to be transporting detained immigrants.Large rallies also took place in Dallas and Austin on Monday, and up to 1,800 protests are planned nationwide on Saturday, to coincide with the military parade Donald Trump is throwing on his birthday in the nation’s capital. More

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      American carnage revisited as Trump plays president of permanent emergency

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      Donald Trump was hundreds of miles away from the White House on Tuesday, visiting one the country’s most venerable military bases, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, partly to big-up Saturday’s forthcoming celebration of America’s armed might in Washington – a parade spectacular ostensibly held in honor of the US armed forces’ birthday. But also his own.With a new setting came the chance for a new theme. Instead the president chose an old one – American carnage.It was the same discordant melody he had gone off on in his memorably dark first inauguration speech of January 2017, prompting George W Bush – who has kept an otherwise sphinx-like silence on things Trumpian in recent years – to murmur that it was “some weird shit”.Given the martial setting, it would have been worthier, though unquestionably duller, to hum a tune of virtue and valor.But with Los Angeles, long his favourite city whipping boy, in the spotlight – by dint of his having dispatched 4,000 national guards troops there on dubious pretext to confront protesters against his immigration roundups – there was never a chance of that.Confrontation on the streets of what is sometimes called Tinseltown but is more noted by the president’s Maga followers as the capital of “woke” handed Trump the chance to adopt his most favoured posture – the president of permanent emergency.Having used economic emergency powers to adopt, against all sound advice, tariffs, and other legislation designed to be applied only in wartime to unleash the furies on undocumented migrants, he now had the perfect setting to expound on the extraordinary measures he planned to take against domestic unrest.“I want to say a few words about the situation in Los Angeles, California,” he told his audience of uniformed active servicemen. Context and setting, you understood, was everything here.What were once considered policing matters would require, not to put too fine a point on it, military solutions. “The police in LA, who are very good, but they weren’t aggressive, like our soldiers. Our soldiers really were aggressive,” he said.Weird shit indeed.View image in fullscreenThe national guard and active Marine Corps deployments in LA, he strongly hinted, would not be the last.“I will be calling you early, as I see this happening,” he said, expanding his horizons to other settings, taking the opportunity to target Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota – running mate of Kamala Harris, Trump’s defeated Democratic opponent in last year’s presidential election.“Because, you know, in theory,” he said, warming – revealingly – to his theme, “I guess you could say a governor could call, but they don’t call. They let their city burn, like in Minneapolis.”Walz, Trump went, had refused to deploy the national guard in Minneapolis after violence flared in the city amid protests in 2020 following the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin.“I called the guard and I saved it, but I wish I would have called it the first day,” he said.In fact, local media reports say records confirm that it was Walz who called in the national guard. But no matter, Trump had made his intent clear.The US military – buoyed with its new $1tn budget announced in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill” and a pay rise announced in his speech – had a new enemy, and it lay inside America’s borders.Those troops on duty on the streets of Los Angeles were setting the template others could honorably follow.“Not only are these service members defending the honor of citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself,” he said. “And they are heroes. They’re fighting for us. They’re stopping an invasion, just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is, most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways. It’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform, because you don’t know exactly who they are.”For Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, and Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, there was some ominous “enemy within” language of the type Trump resorted to on last year’s campaign trail.“They’re incompetent, and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists,” he said. “They’re engaged in this willful attempt to nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders.”It was a tour of Trump’s darkest horizons – all the bleaker for being leavened with a comical parting serenade.As he exited the stage, the PA boomed out his favorite anthem, the Village People’s YMCA. The president drew the biggest cheer of the day from the watching troops by playful indulging in his trademark little dance, culled from distant memories of late nights at Studio 54. Then he waddled off stage, like some aging dystopian disco king. More