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      Capitol rioter falsely accused of being double agent sentenced to probation

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      A man targeted by rightwing conspiracy theories about the US Capitol riot was sentenced on Tuesday to a year of probation for joining the January 6 attack by a mob of fellow Donald Trump supporters.Ray Epps, a former Arizona resident who was driven into hiding by death threats, pleaded guilty in September to a misdemeanor charge. He received no jail time, and there were no restrictions placed on his travel during his probation, but he will have to serve 100 hours of community service.He appeared remotely by video conference and was not in the Washington courtroom when chief judge James Boasberg sentenced him. Prosecutors had recommended a six-month term of imprisonment for Epps.Epps’s sentencing took place in the same building where Trump was attending an appeals court hearing as the Republican former president’s lawyers argued he is immune from prosecution on charges he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost.The Fox News Channel and other rightwing media outlets amplified conspiracy theories that Epps, 62, was an undercover government agent who helped incite the Capitol attack to entrap Trump supporters.Epps filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year, saying the network was to blame for spreading baseless claims about him.Epps told the judge that he now knows that he never should have believed the lies about a stolen election that Trump and his allies told and that Fox News broadcast.“I have learned that truth is not always found in the places that I used to trust,” said Epps, who asked for mercy before learning his sentence.The judge noted that many conspiracy theorists still refuse to believe that the Capitol riot was an insurrection carried out by Trump supporters. The judge said he hopes that the threats against Epps and his wife subside so they can move on with their lives.“You were hounded out of your home,” the judge said. “You were hounded out of your town.”Federal prosecutors have backed up Epps’s vehement denials that he was a government plant or FBI operative. They say Epps has never been a government employee or agent beyond serving in the US marines from 1979 to 1983.The ordeal has forced Epps and his wife to sell their property and businesses and flee their home in Queen Creek, Arizona, according to his lawyer.“He enjoys no golf, tennis, travel, or other trappings of retirement. They live in a trailer in the woods, away from their family, friends, and community,” attorney Edward Ungvarsky wrote in a court filing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe internet-fueled accusations that upended Epps’s life have persisted even after the justice department charged him with participating in the January 6 siege.“Fear of demented extremists has no apparent end in sight so long as those who spread hate and lies about Mr Epps don’t speak loudly and publicly to correct the messaging they delivered,” Epps’s lawyer wrote.Epps pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct on restricted grounds, a charge punishable by a maximum of one year behind bars. Prosecutors say Epps encouraged the mob to storm the Capitol, helped other rioters push a large metal-framed sign into a group of officers and participated in “a rugby scrum-like group effort” to push past a line of police officers.A prosecutor, Michael Gordon, said Epps does not deserve to be inundated with death threats but should serve jail time for his conduct on 6 January 2021.“He didn’t start the riot,” Gordon told the judge. “He made it worse.”Epps’s lawyer sought six months of probation without any jail time. Ungvarsky said his client went to Washington on 6 January 2021 to peacefully protest against the certification of the electoral college vote for Joe Biden over Trump. More

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      Russia arrests US man on drug trafficking charges

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      A US national has been arrested on drug trafficking charges in Russia, the latter nation said on Tuesday, bringing the number of Americans detained by authorities in Moscow to at least three as tensions rise over the Ukraine war.Robert Romanov Woodland, 32, was arrested on 5 January, Reuters reported, citing the Russian news website Mash, which said Woodland faced a 20-year prison sentence if convicted.A district court in the northern Moscow suburb of Ostankino ruled on Saturday to keep Woodland in custody until 5 March on charges of attempted large-scale production and sale of illegal drugs.No other details were immediately available. Neither the US state department nor US the embassy in Moscow has commented, and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, did not address it at a press conference later on Tuesday in Tel Aviv.Russian media said that the name of the accused matches that of a US citizen interviewed by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2020, who said he was born in the Perm region of Russia’s Ural mountains in 1991 and adopted by an American couple at the age of two.The man said he later traveled to Russia to find his birth mother, and after locating her he decided to stay in the town of Dolgoprudny, 15 miles north of central Moscow. He said he worked as an English teacher at a local school.Woodland’s arrest comes as relations between the US and Russia grow increasingly strained as the war in Ukraine continues. Efforts by the Biden administration to secure the release of two other Americans jailed in Russia – the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the former marine Paul Whelan – were rejected last month, and Woodland’s detention will fuel analysts’ fears that they are being held as bargaining chips.Russia freed the American basketball star Brittney Griner, who spent almost 10 months in jail on drug charges, in December 2022 in exchange for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” who was held in a US prison for 12 years.At the time, Joe Biden expressed regret the deal did not include Whelan, 53, a corporate security executive from Michigan who was jailed in 2018 on espionage charges his family and US officials say are false.“While we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up. We will never give up,” the president said, although in an interview last month Whelan, who is serving a 16-year sentence, said he felt “abandoned and betrayed” by the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said last month his government had talked with the US over the two detainees and hoped to “find a solution”.Gershkovich, 32, is the first American journalist to be held in Russia on spying charges since the end of the cold war. He was arrested in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg on a reporting trip in March 2023 and has been held behind bars since. Like Woodland, he faces a 20-year prison term if convicted.No trial date has been set, and the US government has declared him to be wrongfully detained.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Will US spending deal be enough to avert government shutdown?

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      Congressional leaders reached an agreement on overall spending levels to fund the federal government in 2024, a significant step toward averting a shutdown later this month. But political divisions on immigration and other domestic priorities could stall its progress.The deal is separate from bipartisan Senate negotiations that would pair new border security measures with additional funding for Israel and Ukraine. That proposal was expected to be released as early as this week, but a senator involved in the talks said on Monday that the timeline was “doubtful”.The details of this deal, negotiated by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Democratic Senate majority, Chuck Schumer, must still be worked out. Joe Biden praised the deal but some conservatives are unhappy, underscoring the fragile nature of the agreement with just days left to finalize it.What’s the deal?Congressional leaders agreed on a “topline” figure to finance the federal government in fiscal year 2024: $1.59tn. In a letter to colleagues over the weekend, Johnson said the spending levels include $886bn for the military and $704bn for non-defense spending.Johnson said Republican negotiators won “key modifications” as part of the deal, which he said will further reduce non-military spending by $16bn from a previous agreement brokered by Kevin McCarthy, then the House speaker, and Biden. Additionally, he noted that the overall spending levels were roughly $30bn less than a proposal the Senate had considered.The agreement rescinds roughly $6bn in unspent Covid relief funds and accelerates plans to slash by $20bn new funding that the Internal Revenue Service was supposed to receive under the Inflation Reduction Act, Johnson said.Congressional negotiators are now up against a tight deadline to write and pass 12 individual appropriations bills, an unlikely feat given the timeframe. Funding for roughly one-fifth of the government expires on 19 January, while the rest of the government remains funded until 2 February. Alternative options include a continuing resolution, known as a CR, or an all-in-one omnibus bill, both of which conservatives find unpalatable.How are leaders selling it?Biden said the agreement “moves us one step closer to preventing a needless government shutdown and protecting important national priorities”.“It reflects the funding levels that I negotiated with both parties and signed into law last spring,” Biden said in a statement. “It rejects deep cuts to programs hardworking families count on, and provides a path to passing full-year funding bills that deliver for the American people and are free of any extreme policies.”Democratic leaders cast the deal as a win. “When we began negotiations, our goal was to preserve a non-defense funding level of $772bn – the same level agreed to in our debt ceiling deal last June – and that $772bn was precisely the number we reached. Not a nickel – not a nickel – was cut,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday.While Johnson touted several “hard-fought concessions” secured in the deal, he also acknowledged that not everyone in his caucus would be pleased by the agreement.“While these final spending levels will not satisfy everyone, and they do not cut as much spending as many of us would like, this deal does provide us a path to: 1) move the process forward; 2) reprioritize funding within the topline towards conservative objectives, instead of last year’s Schumer-Pelosi omnibus; and 3) fight for the important policy riders included in our House FY24 bills,” he wrote in the letter.Can it hold?Even if lawmakers can work at lightning speed to draft a dozen appropriations bills in time, several hurdles lie ahead. Johnson, who holds a narrow majority in the House, is already facing a revolt from conservatives in his caucus.Hours after the speaker announced a deal had been reached, the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus railed against it. “It’s even worse than we thought. Don’t believe the spin,” it said. “This is total failure.”Several conservatives say they want to see Johnson attach strict new border security measures to any government funding deal, and some have signaled a willingness to shut down the government if those demands are not met.In an interview on Sunday, Elise Stefanik, the No 4 House Republican, did not rule it out as a course of action.“We don’t support shutting down the government,” Stefanik said. “But we must secure the border. We must secure the border. That’s where the American people are. We’re losing our country in front of our very eyes.”Schumer said Democrats would balk at the inclusion of any “poison pill” amendments.“If the hard right chooses to spoil this agreement with poison pills, they’ll be to blame if we start careening towards a shutdown,” he said on Monday. “And I know Speaker Johnson has said that nobody wants to see a shutdown happen.”But Johnson is under pressure from the far right, and he knows his job could be on the line. Conservatives moved to oust his predecessor from the speakership after McCarthy struck a deal with Democrats to preserve spending levels and avert a government shutdown. More

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      Biden assails Trump for trying to turn election ‘loss into a lie’

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      From the pulpit of a Black church that was the site of a racist massacre in 2015, Joe Biden cast this year’s presidential election as a battle for truth over lies told by those who seek to “whitewash” the worst chapters of American history – from the deadly assault on the US Capitol to the civil war.“This is a time of choosing,” Biden implored Americans during a visit to Mother Emanuel AME church, where nine Black worshippers were murdered by a white supremacist gunman who they had welcomed into their Bible study. Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, Biden assailed his predecessor and likely 2024 Republican opponent as a “loser” who sought to overthrow the will of the 81 million Americans who voted for the Democratic president.“In their world, these Americans, including you, don’t count,” Biden told supporters. “But that’s not the real world. That’s not democracy. That’s not America.”Biden’s remarks were briefly interrupted by protesters angry with the president’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “Ceasefire now,” they shouted from the pews. Their calls were drowned out by chanting from the president’s supporters: “Four more years.”“I understand their passion,” the president said. He then told them: “I’ve been quietly working with the Israeli government to get them to reduce and significantly get out of Gaza.”The protest was a stark reminder of the challenges the 81-year-old president faces as he runs for re-election. Growing dissatisfaction with his handling of the war in Gaza has hurt Biden’s standing among key Democratic constituencies, as widespread unease with the economy and concerns about his age drive negative perceptions of his job performance and his re-election prospects.The Charleston speech came days after Biden delivered a scathing condemnation of Trump in a 31-minute address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in which he excoriated the former president for fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Taken together, the speeches lay out what the president believes are the stakes of the 2024 election: American democracy itself.Biden is sharpening his campaign rhetoric as the electoral coalition he carried to defeat Trump in 2020 shows signs of fraying. Polling indicates an erosion of support among Black voters, a critical voting bloc for the party.The president was introduced by the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, a Democrat and prominent Black leader whose 2020 endorsement helped resurrect Biden’s flailing campaign and secured Biden’s primary victory in the state. Biden said it was the support of Black voters in South Carolina and Clyburn especially that allowed him to stand before them as president.“I owe you,” he said.Biden noted the record-low levels of Black unemployment since he took office, and touted the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to the supreme court, as well as legislation that lowered the cost of prescription drugs and made 19 June, Juneteenth, a federal holiday. He praised Vice-President Kamala Harris’s efforts to secure votings rights, though legislation has stalled in the narrowly divided Senate.“Slavery was the cause of the civil war,” he declared to loud applause from the audience. Weeks earlier, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, who initially failed to cite slavery as a cause of the civil war when asked by a voter in New Hampshire.Biden made no mention of the incident, but he connected efforts to rewrite the history of the civil war as a patriotic fight for “states’ rights” to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election and undermine democratic institutions.“We’re living in an era of a second Lost Cause,” he said. “There’s some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie – a lie which if allowed to live will once again bring terrible damage to this country.”In a statement before Biden’s speech, Haley’s campaign accused Biden of “politicized racial speech” and noted that it was Haley who removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds after the Charleston massacre as the governor of South Carolina.The visit to South Carolina comes ahead of the 3 February Democratic presidential primary in the state, which launches the party’s nominating contest. At Biden’s urging, the Democratic National Committee put South Carolina first on the Democratic primary calendar as a reflection of how important Black voters are to the party.Biden faces only a nominal challenge for his party’s nomination.Biden spoke emotionally about the Charleston shooting, calling white supremacy a “poison” that “throughout our history has ripped this nation apart”. At Mother Emanuel, Biden said: “The word of God was pierced by bullets of hate, propelled not just by gunpowder, but by poison.”Biden recalled attending a memorial service in Charleston in the days after the attack. He said he came to grieve with the community, but he too found healing in those very pews. Weeks before, Biden had buried his eldest son, Beau Biden.“We prayed together,” Biden said, his voice stricken with emotion. “We grieved together. We found hope together.” More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders makes a splash in Arkansas – can she climb higher?

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      Shortly after taking office in January, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders launched a powerful salvo in the so-called war on woke being waged by Republicans.Sanders, 41, signed an executive order targeting critical race theory, an academic field that probes how racism affects US society and laws. The move aligned with countrywide Republican opposition to the discipline.“Our job is to protect the students, and we’re going to take steps every single day to make sure we do exactly that,” Sanders said in a statement. “And that’s the reason I signed the executive order. I’m proud of the fact that we’re taking those steps and we’re going to continue to do it every single day that I’m in office.”Sanders also barred the use in state of documents of “Latinx”, which an expert described as a “gender-neutral term to describe US residents of Latin American descent”.Days after this slew of executive orders, Sanders also delivered the Republican address responding to Joe Biden’s State of the Union, during which she evoked immigrants, liberals and others held up as boogeymen by her former boss Donald Trump during his presidency.“From out-of-control inflation and violent crime to the dangerous border crisis and threat from China, Biden and the Democrats have failed you,” Sanders proclaimed, later warning: “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”Sanders’s fight, however, didn’t end during her first weeks in office. Far from it, in an October executive order meant “to eliminate woke, anti-women words from state government and respect women”, Sanders prohibited phrases such as “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding” from being used in “official state government business”.That Sanders was even in a position to mount such a comprehensive assault on certain progressive initiative might have come as a shock to some political observers. Sanders had worked as Trump’s press secretary, and other acolytes of the former president fared poorly after he left the White House.But to those familiar with Arkansas politics, and to Sanders herself, her ascent did not come as a surprise. Nor did she simply luck out on account of her father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Rather, they say that Sanders is an immensely skilled communicator and politician with a deep understanding of speaking to voters’ wants and needs.“Mike Huckabee had been governor for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, and had been very successful,” said Andrew Dowdle, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. “She had spent some time working with his campaign and so, to some degree, that kind of ends up giving her roots here that other candidates might not have had.”While other states didn’t immediately jump to elect Trump associates, Sanders’s bona fides with the former president seemed to play well with the Arkansas electorate. “Statewide, Donald Trump was very popular as well, so that ended up giving her a little bit of a political boost,” Dowdle said.And though Arkansas didn’t have much in the way of far-right leanings, Sanders has been able to appeal to a wide range of Republicans. Sanders “bridges those two camps – but at the same time, she does end up really being viewed by the more populist wing as one of theirs”.Hal Bass, a professor emeritus of political science who taught Sanders’ at her alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, said: “She was a natural – I think kind of born and bred in the sense.”Bass added that Sanders “very much grew up in the political area”. He also said she showed great promise as a student and campus leader. A double-major in political science and communications, Sanders took several classes with Bass and worked in his office.He also sponsored the student government organization in which she was active.“Ouachita is a small college, small campus, so you would see her out and about over the course of her time here,” Bass said. “She was intelligent, she was articulate, she was fun – she was very much a popular student.”When Sanders worked in his office, peers would just drop by to visit and speak with her. Her organizational skills were clear in how she ran student meetings.When it came time for class, she was a key player in class discussions and wrote excellent exams. “I wasn’t at all surprised to see her pursue a career in politics out of college,” Bass said.As for Sanders’s success despite other Trump-linked candidates’ struggles, Bass said: “I certainly think she has an identity in Arkansas that is more than simply an extension of Donald Trump.” He pointed to her father’s popularity as governor as fomenting that identity.“It gave her name identification, [and] it also gave her goodwill,” Bass said. “I think it is certainly more difficult now to … distinguish her from the Trump era than it was at the beginning of her political rise.“But in terms of developing a political identity, a political persona, I think those foundations were laid before” the 2016 presidential election won by Trump.Margaret Scranton, a political science professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, also pointed to how Sanders’s father taught her lots about governance.“She grew up in a governor’s mansion, and so she saw firsthand how a lot of things work – whether it’s having state troopers and security, or managing the press,” Scranton said. “Having a family who understands state and national politics gives you a set of sounding boards that the average person who did not grow up in a governor’s mansion wouldn’t have.”Scranton, whose academic interest in executive leadership focuses on communications, said: “She really is a phenomenal communicator.” Scranton pointed to Sanders’s response to Biden’s State of the Union.“If I just read the transcript, I would see a very Trumpian set of themes that look like ‘American carnage’ – whether it’s the border or immigration or fentanyl, unemployment, a landscape of disaster after disaster,” Scranton said.“Watching her deliver, her tone is more gentle. Her rhetoric is not as stark. She’s saying similar things but in a much more approachable kind of language.”The professor said: “She draws you in, her body language, her face. Occasionally she’ll kind of smile, and there will be a twinkle in her eyes.”Asked if Sanders might have higher political ambitions, Scranton said “absolutely”.Yet whether Sanders can one day be a credible candidate for the Oval Office once occupied by her ex-boss will depend on her performance in office.She endured several first-year foibles, among them outcry over her efforts to restrict public records access and a lectern that cost $19,000. It remains to be seen whether those can hurt her governorship overall.Still, Sanders’s youth and success make her a viable option for those conservatives who say they are ready for new Republican party standard bearers.“One of her themes is, ‘It’s time for a new generation of leaders in the Republican party,’” Scranton said. “There’s a huge opportunity there.” More

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      Biden attacks Trump as grave threat to democracy in rousing 2024 speech

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      A day before the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Joe Biden delivered a pointed speech to warn voters against re-electing Donald Trump, criticizing the likely Republican presidential nominee as a fundamental threat to democracy in an attempt to shape the dynamics of the 2024 election.“Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.“America, as we began this election year, we must be clear: democracy is on the ballot.”Sharply contrasting himself with his opponent, Biden accused Trump of attempting to undermine America’s system of government, painting the Republican leader as a would-be autocrat hellbent on revenge. Biden noted that Trump had vowed “retribution” against his political enemies if he is elected, and had indicated he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him – not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.”The speech came a day before the anniversary of the January 6 attack in 2021, when a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bipartisan Senate report found that seven people died as a result of the insurrection, and Trump now faces four felony counts over his role in the attack and his broader campaign to overturn the election results.But Trump has continued to defend those who carried out the attack as “patriots”, promising to issue pardons to them if he is elected.“In trying to rewrite the facts of January 6, Trump was trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election. But we knew the truth because we saw with our own eyes,” Biden said.“Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the constitution. They were there to destroy the constitution.”Trump, who spoke to hundreds of supporters in Iowa Friday night in his first campaign visit of 2024, shot back at Biden’s speech, painting a dark portrait of the US. He called it a “failing” nation, beset by “terrorists” and immigrants from “mental asylums” pouring over the US-Mexico border.Biden highlighted the setting of his speech, which took place roughly 10 miles from Valley Forge national historical park in Pennsylvania, to underscore the high stakes of the presidential race. During America’s fight for independence in the revolutionary war, George Washington and his Continental army troops camped at Valley Forge during a difficult winter.“After all we’ve been through in our history – from independence to civil war to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection – I refuse to believe that in 2024 we Americans would choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty,” Biden said.The speech came at a particularly vulnerable moment for Biden. Polls show Biden’s approval rating mired in the high 30s with Americans expressing concerns about the state of the economy, despite strong job creation and the easing of inflation. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that only 22% of Americans view economic conditions as “good” or “excellent”, while 78% consider current conditions to be “fair” or “poor”. National polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in a hypothetical general election.Biden is holding a series of events to reframe the 2024 election as a fight for democracy and fundamental freedoms. In addition to the Valley Forge speech, Biden will speak on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine African Americans were fatally shot by a white supremacist in 2015.Biden’s campaign has said the president will also hold events later this month to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a federal right to abortion access. That ruling was overturned by the conservative-leaning supreme court in 2022, resulting in abortion bans in more than a dozen states.“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said, ‘We are in the battle for the soul of America,’” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Tuesday. “As we look towards November 2024, we still are. The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since.”Despite that grim outlook, Biden expressed his trademark optimism as he spoke to supporters in Pennsylvania, reiterating his message of American exceptionalism and urging voters to embrace hope.“None of you believe America is failing. We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: who are we?”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trans candidate disqualified in Ohio for omitting previous name

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      Despite receiving enough signatures to appear on the ballot, a transgender woman has been disqualified from an Ohio state house race because she omitted her previous name, raising concern that other transgender candidates nationwide may face similar barriers.Vanessa Joy of was one of four transgender candidates running for state office in Ohio, largely in response to proposed restrictions of the rights of LGBTQ+ people. She was running as a Democrat in house district 50 – a heavily Republican district in Stark county, Ohio – against Republican candidate Matthew Kishman. Joy legally changed her name and birth certificate in 2022, which she says she provided to the Stark county board of elections for the 19 March primary race.But as Joy found out on Tuesday, a little-known 1990s state law says that a candidate must provide any name changes within the last five years to qualify for the ballot. Since the law is not currently listed on the candidate requirement guidelines on the Ohio secretary of state’s website, Joy did not know it existed.To provide her former name, Joy said, would be to use her deadname – a term used by the transgender community to refer to the name given at birth, not one they chose that aligns with their gender identity.And while Joy said the spirit of the law is to weed out bad actors, it creates a barrier for transgender people who want to run for office and may not want to share their deadname for important reasons, including concern about their personal safety.“If I had known that I had to put my deadname on my petitions, I personally would have because being elected was important to me,” Joy said. “But for many it would be a barrier to entry because they would not want their names on the petitions.”She continued: “It’s a danger, and that name is dead.”The office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, and the Stark county board of elections did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Thursday. It is not clear if this law has applied to any current or previous state lawmakers.Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA law school and an election expert, said that requiring candidates to disclose any name changes posed problems in Ohio, but generally serves a purpose. “If a candidate has something to hide in their past like criminal activity, disclosing former names used by the candidate would make sense,” Hasen said in an email.Sean Meloy, the vice-president of political programs for the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ+ candidates, said he did not know of tracking efforts to find how many states require name changes in petition paperwork.“The biggest issue is the selective enforcement of it,” Meloy said in an interview on Thursday.Over the past few years, many states have ramped up restrictions on transgender people – including barring minors from accessing gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers and hormones. In some states, that has extended to limitations on which school bathrooms trans children and students can use and which sports teams they can join.Last year, Meloy said, a record number of candidates who are transgender sought and won office, and he expects that trend to continue in 2024.Ohio lawmakers passed restrictions late last year that were vetoed by the state’s Republican governor, though many Republican state representatives say they are planning to override that veto as soon as next week.Meloy said that some conservatives are trying to silence transgender voices.He pointed to Zooey Zephyr, a transgender lawmaker who was blocked last year from speaking on Montana’s House floor after she refused to apologize for telling colleagues who supported a ban on gender-affirming care that they would have blood on their hands.“Now that anti-trans legislation is being moved once again,” Meloy said, “this seems like a selectively enforced action to try to keep another trans person from doing that.”Joy appealed against her disqualification on Thursday, and is now seeking legal representation. She plans to try to change Ohio’s law. More

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      US ‘won’t survive’ four more years of Trump ‘chaos’, Nikki Haley says

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      The re-election of Donald Trump would bring “four more years of chaos” the US “won’t survive”, the former president’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, told an Iowa audience, turning her fire on the frontrunner as the first vote of the 2024 primary looms.The former South Carolina governor has caught up with Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, in the battle for second place in Republican presidential polling. The gap between Haley and Trump is also closing, particularly in New Hampshire, the second state to vote when it holds its primary on 23 January.Trump faces a slate of criminal and civil trials as well as attempts to keep him off the ballot, for inciting the 6 January 2021 insurrection.Nonetheless, he remains formidably popular with the Republican base and Haley, who as UN ambassador under Trump was often touted as a potential vice-president, must perform a balancing act on the campaign trail.In Iowa, she said Trump had been “the right president at the right time”. But she added: “The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”Saying she used to tell Trump he was “his own worst enemy”, Haley added: “We have a country to save, and that means no more drama. No more taking things personally.”Haley was speaking in Des Moines, as CNN hosted town hall events for her and DeSantis, rivals who will also meet on the debate stage next week, as Trump continues to avoid such traditional forums. DeSantis also used his airtime to attack Trump, but Haley is widely seen to have acquired greater momentum and therefore attracted greater attention.A confident performer and stump speaker, she is not immune to gaffes. On stage at Grand View University, she addressed her controversial failure last week in New Hampshire to say slavery caused the civil war.Saying she “had Black friends growing up”, and that slavery was “a very talked-about thing” in her state (the first to secede in 1860, its declaration of secession citing slavery as the cause), Haley said: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have said slavery. But in my mind that’s a given, that everybody associates the civil war with slavery.”She was also forced to deal with a remark in New Hampshire only the day before, when she appeared to dismiss the importance of Iowa, telling voters: “You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”DeSantis is Trump’s closest challenger in Iowa, Haley closest in New Hampshire. In Iowa, Haley claimed she had been joking.“You are going to see me fight until the very end, on the last day in Iowa,” she said. “And I’m not playing in one state. I’m fighting in every state. Because I think everybody’s worth fighting for.”Trump’s campaign has switched to a fighting stance, airing its first attack ad against Haley in New Hampshire this week, portraying her as soft on immigration.That offensive coincided with Haley securing the endorsement of Don Bolduc, a far-right former special forces general who ran for US Senate with Trump’s backing but now says: “With Trump, there’s too many distractions. There’s too much risk of losing.”Still, any Trump opponent faces an uphill fight: Haley’s state, South Carolina, will vote in February and she trails Trump there by about 30 points. There are also other candidates still in the race.On Thursday, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate, pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, angrily rejected calls to drop out and throw his weight behind Haley.“The fact is that I’m running for president of the United States and no one’s voted yet,” Christie told Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio host, in an interview that started awkwardly and went downhill from there. “And I don’t have an obligation to do anything other than to answer questions, tell the truth, run a good campaign, and try to win. And so, you know, where this has become Nikki Haley’s campaign when no one’s voted yet is kind of a mystery to me.”The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are also still in the race. But their odds are even longer than Christie’s.On Friday, writing on Substack, the Republican operative turned anti-Trump crusader Steve Schmidt said: “Nikki Haley is an imitation of Trump, a hollow woman … firmly on Trump’s side of the field. She is an acolyte who has strayed, probably much to Trump’s amusement because he knows she will be back in the menagerie more loyal than ever.“It is Chris Christie who stands alone against Trump. He is … the only moral choice.”Christie, however, told Hewitt that if he did not win the nomination, and even if Trump did, he would not vote for Joe Biden. More