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      China warns US of retaliation over Trump’s 100% tariffs threat

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      Beijing has told the US it will retaliate if Donald Trump fails to back down on his threat to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports as investors brace for another bout of trade war turmoil.China’s commerce ministry blamed Washington for raising trade tensions between the two countries after Trump announced on Friday that he would impose the additional tariffs on China’s exports to the US, along with new controls on critical software, by 1 November.“Wilful threats of high tariffs are not the right way to get along with China,” a spokesperson for the commerce ministry said on Sunday, according to the state news agency Xinhua. “China’s position on the trade war is consistent. We do not want it, but we are not afraid of it.“If the United States insists on going the wrong way, China will surely take resolute measures to protect its legitimate rights and interests.”Trump and senior US administration officials opened a door to a China trade deal on Sunday as market futures showed another US stock market drop.“Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.The message came after JD Vance called on Beijing to “choose the path of reason” in the latest spiralling trade fight between the world’s two leading economies that has shaken stock markets.Dow futures showed a drop of 887 points ahead of the stock markets’ open on Monday. The index dropped sharply lower on Friday after reignited fears of a trade war with China when threatened to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports after China said it would restrict rare earth exports. The Dow fell 879 points, or 1.9%.“It’s going to be a delicate dance, and a lot of it is going to depend on how the Chinese respond,” Vance said on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures. “If they respond in a highly aggressive manner, I guarantee you, the president of the United States has far more cards than the People’s Republic of China. If, however, they’re willing to be reasonable,” he said, then the US would, too.The US president shocked the financial markets on Friday when he accused China of “very hostile” moves to restrict exports of rare-earth materials needed by US industry.It prompted heavy falls on Wall Street, where about $2tn (£1.5tn) was wiped off the value of the US stocks.China insisted on Sunday that its latest export controls on rare earths such as holmium, erbium, thulium, europium and ytterbium were legitimate.“China’s export controls are not export bans,” said the commerce ministry spokesperson. “All applications of compliant export for civil use can get approval, so that relevant businesses have no need to worry.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe measures were introduced after Washington added a number of Chinese firms to its export control list in a crackdown on the use of foreign affiliates to circumvent export curbs on chipmaking equipment and other goods and technology.The UK’s FTSE 100 share index fell almost 1% on Friday as Trump’s threat sparked a late selloff. The futures market indicates there could be further losses in London and New York on Monday, although there could also be relief that Beijing has not yet retaliated.Bitcoin, which had tumbled 8% after Trump’s post on Truth Social, rose by 4% on Sunday after China refrained from retaliating.Trump’s tariff threat was “a rather unwelcome development for financial markets” as investors had “by and large moved on from the trade and tariff story”, said Michael Brown, a senior research strategist at the brokerage firm Pepperstone.“Chiefly, the question that every man and his dog are attempting to answer is whether this is a credible threat, that the Trump admin might follow through on, or whether this is another example of the ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strategy that Trump used so frequently earlier in the year.“A strategy where outlandish and ridiculous tariff figures are threatened, in an attempt to focus minds, extract concessions from the other party, and ultimately come to agreement faster than otherwise might’ve been possible.” More

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      Maga figures back Bukele’s call for Trump to crack down on US judges

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      Donald Trump is not known for taking advice, especially from foreign leaders who often seek to flatter and compliment the US president.But El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has followed a different tack by calling on the Trump administration to follow his example in impeaching “corrupt judges”.His call for Trump to take action against the US judiciary also received support from Maga figures, including an X post by one-time close Trump ally Elon Musk, who has in the past boosted Bukele’s calls to impeach US judges.Experts say Bukele’s latest intervention comes at a time of unprecedented threats to judicial independence and individual judges in the US, and in a period where the Trump administration is employing the same authoritarian tactics used by authoritarians in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, India and Bukele’s own El Salvador to subvert democratic accountability.Bukele’s online call last week was just the latest in a long series of taunts and allegations he has made against the US’s legal system, including a March claim that the US was “facing a judicial coup”, and his mockery of a federal judge’s order to halt deportation flights sending accused illegal immigrants to his country’s brutal prison system.Bukele’s impeachment call was also made amid social media attacks on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Musk, and Trump himself in a recent press gaggle.Immergut had issued restraining orders preventing Trump from mobilizing the national guard, first in Oregon then in California. Trump has been gunning to send troops into Portland, which the president has characterized as “war-ravaged” on the basis of small, non-violent protests outside the city’s homeland security facility.Miller, Bondi and Musk have a long record of attacking judges who have ruled against Trump’s executive orders or otherwise impeded the administration’s political agenda. Before resuming office this year, Trump directed his followers against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with threats and harassment.Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies and judges themselves have pointed to a heightened atmosphere of threats and intimidation in the months since he re-entered the White House.According to data gathered by the US Marshals Service, in 2025 through to the end of September, there were 562 threats to 395 federal judges, giving rise to 805 investigations. 2025 has already eclipsed 2022, the first year of published records, and 2024, and is on track to exceed 2023’s record of 630 threats made.The threats are not just happening at the federal level. Data from Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative indicates that there have been at least 59 instances of threats, harassment, stalking, or violence committed against judges on the local level in 2025.Experts say that the threats are a product of the rhetoric coming from senior administration figures.In May, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a detailed report alleging that “malicious and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and allies coincide with escalating violent posts on social media”. It recorded “a 54% increase in calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges across social media platforms from January to February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s administration”.Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of GPAHE, said: “Trump’s threats against judges have definitely driven online vitriol at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s march towards authoritarianism.”That march towards authoritarianism has been well-trodden in recent years in several countries, including by Bukele.In 2021, immediately after commencing a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the country’s attorney general and five justices on the constitutional court. The judges, who had provoked his ire by ruling against coronavirus measures, made way for replacements hand picked by Bukele.The move echoed Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and attempts at similar moves in Israel and Poland.Experts say that the threats and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as attempts to undermine judicial independence in a system that offers no easy way for the executive to dismiss judges Trump disapproves of.Meghan Leonard, an associate professor at Illinois State University who has researched authoritarian backsliding in democracies, said the Trump administration had learned from the examples set by authoritarians overseas.“The administration is looking around at these successes and failures. They know they’re not going to be able to pass any legislation that would weaken the judiciary,” she said.Pointing to examples such as Miller’s relentless assertions of nearly limitless presidential authority, she added: “They directly attack the judiciary by repeating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.“They continue to reframe the debate by repeating their claim that the president has more power than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”Leonard said: “Judges’ only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of weakening institutional legitimacy may make judges think twice about decisions that go against the current administration, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for democracy.”Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, has written about the use of “autocratic legalism“ by the likes of Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about escalating threats to judges in the US.She pointed to a wave of so-called “pizza doxxings“ this year, in which judges have received unsolicited pizza deliveries with the recipient listed as Daniel Anderl, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was killed at the judge’s home in 2020 by a gunman targeting Salas.“Everyone understands what it means. ‘We know where you live. ‘We’re coming for you,’” Scheppele said.“Federal judges are protected by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both specialized police units that sit institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been leading the attacks on federal judges”On the administration’s aims, Scheppele said that “impeaching a federal judge is almost certainly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. Right now, I don’t think that the desire of the Trump administration is to remove the judges via impeachment. It is to scare the judges enough to get some of them to think twice about ruling against the administration.”She said: “Bukele knows how to play that game. He’s very skilled at it. I’m not surprised that he’s annotating the US crisis and cheering on Trump. He knows that Trump lives online; he’s also currying favor.”Beirich said: “It’s not surprising that someone like Bukele would do this, or Hungary’s Orbán, given their autocratic behavior. But an American president supposedly supportive of democracy should know better.” More

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      Democrats refuse to fold over shutdown as Republican outrage builds

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      When he sat down to talk about the US government shutdown with reporters from a closely read political newsletter this week, Chuck Schumer sounded as if he were relishing his standoff with the Republicans.“Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News. As the shutdown got under way, Schumer explained, the Republicans believed that Democrats would quickly fold and vote to reopen the government, but instead they had stuck to their guns for a week and a half, demanding an array of concessions on healthcare and other issues.Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it before press conferences. The shutdown has prompted federal agencies to close or curtail operations nationwide, and forced hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home without immediate pay. Schumer, Republicans argued, was being callous.“I’ve been asked many times in interviews the last couple days: ‘You seem angry – you don’t get angry a lot.’ I don’t, but this is beyond the pale,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said at a press conference on Friday morning, the 10th day of the shutdown. “What Chuck Schumer is doing right now, it’s sickening.”Hours later, the White House took it upon itself to increase the misery for government employees when Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget, began following through on his threat to carry out layoffs. The budget office said that more than 4,000 federal workers were being fired from a variety of agencies that had already shrunk in the second Trump administration, and the funding situation was “fluid and rapidly evolving”. Legal challenges are likely to follow, but still, now it was the Democrats’ turn to accuse the GOP of brutality.“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said in a statement. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people – the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”It was the latest salvo in a battle that began when government funding lapsed on 1 October and has since degenerated into legislative trench warfare. Seven Senate votes have resulted in no breakthroughs, with lawmakers from both parties preventing the other’s proposals from reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.Democrats are maximizing the leverage they have in the upper chamber by refusing to reopen the government until premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans are extended into next year. They also want cuts to the Medicaid program for poor and disabled Americans reversed, funding to public media outlets such as PBS and NPR restored and Donald Trump’s use of “pocket rescissions” to slash spending curbed.Most of those are non-starters for Republicans, who insist government funding be restarted before negotiations take place. They’ve ascribed a variety of motivations to Democrats’ intransigence, from the rise of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic nominee for New York mayor to the influence of a “far-left base” that has the party’s leaders in their thrall.On Friday, Johnson posited that Democratic senators were holding out because they were concerned about a “No Kings” protest planned for 18 October – which he called a “hate America rally” and where attendees might target party leaders if they decided to end the shutdown.“It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes, but the Democrats in the Senate have shown that they’re afraid of that crowd,” Johnson said, alleging that “the antifa crowd, and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists” would be in attendance.“They’re willing to hold the American people hostage so that they don’t have to face an angry mob – that’s a big chunk of their base,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere are indeed outside influences pressuring Democrats to stand firm on their demands, and so far they are happy with the results.“The Democrats, I think, have taken in the blowback, have understood where their folks want them to go, and are actually taking it and fighting back. And it’s a sight to see. It’s a welcome strategic shift,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of progressive organizing group Indivisible, said.In March, Schumer opted to work with Republicans on keeping the government open, prompting Indivisible to call for him to step aside as minority leader. Months later, Levin says his group is coordinating with Schumer’s office on actions to support Democratic lawmakers as the shutdown wears on, and believes the party should not compromise on its demands.Not only are Democrats’ demands “wildly popular”, Republicans are not to be trusted to honor any agreement, he said. Trump and his allies in Congress have made clear their interest in rescissions packages, which can be passed on a party-line vote, to cut spending approved with bipartisan support. After passing one in July that clawed back $9bn in funding for public media and foreign aid, Johnson said he is considering putting together another.“This regime is treating the federal budget like a personal bank account for Donald Trump, and we should stop that,” Levin said. “No deal is a real deal unless you have rescission and payment language.“We’ve got the goods. We are fighting for popular things. The Republicans are closing rural hospitals, increasing costs and giving a lawless administration more power to do what it wants. That’s a losing hand, and we want to see Democrats fight back.” More

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      The quiet toll of Trump’s legal immigration crackdown: ‘I’m trying to stay afloat’

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      Kim Xavier, a senior associate at CoveyLaw, an immigration law firm based in New York, has spent much of the last year bracing herself for any Friday announcements that might affect her clients.So when Donald Trump announced on a recent Friday that he will impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, the timing was not totally surprising.“Every day, it’s like I’m trying to stay afloat. And every Friday, I’m just like, now what?” Xavier told the Guardian.Though headline after headline has highlighted the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Xavier said many Americans don’t realize the heightened uncertainty legal immigrants are facing – something that immigration attorneys like herself have to confront every day.“The perpetual fear that undocumented immigrants have dealt with their entire lives is now spread across the whole immigration system,” Xavier said. “This is something new, I think. This is something that a lot of people don’t understand.”Cracks and fissures have existed within the legal immigration system for years, long before Trump came into office. The last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform was 1986. In the nearly four decades since, those trying to immigrate legally often face ambiguous standards, outdated quotes and backlogs, along with other issues that appear administrative but can have a huge impact on a person’s ability to stay in the country.The difference seen over a generation is stark. “Even for people who have been through the immigration system, they’re like, ‘Oh, 30 years ago, I just came with a suitcase from Canada and I got my green card in three months’. It’s not like that any more,” Xavier said.The pathway to becoming a legal immigrant in the US is a narrow one. A person can get legal status through family – if a spouse, child or parent is a citizen – or through their employer, like H-1B holders, or through extraordinary talent. Though the US has offered legal status for humanitarian purposes, for asylum or refugees, the White House has dramatically cut down on these humanitarian pathways.The Trump administration has emphasizedthat its crackdown on immigration is targeted toward removing undocumented immigrants from the country.“Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: self-deport or we will arrest you,” assistant secretary for homeland security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement last month.But the administration is reportedly trying to cut down on legal immigration too. A recent Reuters report said the White House is planning to cut the number of refugees the US takes in from 125,000 down to 7,500, with the majority of slots reserved for white South Africans.The administration also seems to be combing through the records of immigrants, including green card holders, for potential violations that weren’t considered deportable before his term. In September, an Irish green card holder living in Missouri was detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Kentucky because she wrote a bad check for $25 in 2015.Immigration attorneys like Xavier, who works solely with immigrants who have gone through the process legally, have seen how the ongoing scrutiny has had a chilling effect on legal immigrants who have lived in and even started families in the US.Hanging over the head of many of these immigrants is the threat of losing their legal status, even temporarily, because of what Xavier calls “operational inefficiencies”: ambiguous delays and unclear communication about applications have left lawyers scrambling to keep their clients’ legal status.Processing delays have been a major stress for Xavier’s clients, and can often leave legal immigrants in limbo. Lawyers don’t know when their client will hear back on an application, which can sometimes leave them stuck in the country.One client with a pending green card application applied for “advance parole”, which would allow her to leave the US and legally re-enter even as her green card application is under review. Because her father was undergoing quadruple bypass surgery, she applied for an expedited advanced parole to be with him after the procedure. But, “they still denied the emergency advanced parole,” Xavier said, so she couldn’t travel back home for his surgery.Xavier has also seen clients who have been living in the US for years and have had multiple visas get “soft denials” for renewals, meaning an application has been put on hold pending further documentary and scrutiny.Complicating the process for visa applicants is that the renewal process requires communication between two branches of the federal government: US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is under the Department of Homeland Security, and the consulate of their home country, which falls under the Department of State. Lawyers have said there can often be a lack of communication between the two that causes delays.Delays on application decisions can outlast certain “grace periods” the federal government gives to applicants for certain visas that allow them to legally stay in the country while they await renewal. This puts them at risk of being taken into custody or put into court proceedings when the grace period is up.The Trump administration also recently gave USCIS special agents law enforcement powers, including the ability to make arrests and execute search and arrest warrants, powers that the ACLU has said has never been given to the agency and is a way to “systematically restrict legal immigration and strip people of their legal status”.The added stresses and uncertainty has taken a heavy toll on both immigrants and their employers.“We hear about the erosion of legal immigrant pathways impacting Silicon Valley, but also innovative startups, it’s fashion designers who are using sustainable efforts, it’s architects. There are so many different industries that are impacted here,” Xavier said.Though the changes in immigration enforcement may seem insignificant for legal immigrants, the impact has been huge..“They seem little, they seem incremental, but it’s been a long time coming. It’s been built into the system, and now they are coming at lightning speed, often in different areas and under the radar of the mainstream public, that when taken together they are overwhelmingly detrimental,” Xavier said. “In Spanish, we have a saying that goes la gota que derramó el vaso – it’s the last drop that made the glass overflow. You have these little drops, but they’re coming, and by the time you know it, you’re flooded.” More

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      ‘Substantial’ federal layoffs begin as Congress remains deadlocked over funding to end shutdown – live

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      The Guardian has independently confirmed that reductions in force (RIFs) are under way at the following departments and agencies:

      Department of Education

      Department of Health and Human Services

      Department of Homeland Security (specifically the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

      Department of the Treasury
      Certain agencies haven’t immediately responded to the Guardian’s request for comment, but other media outlets have reported layoffs are expected at the following:

      Environmental Protection Agency

      Department of Energy

      Department of the Interior

      Department of Housing and Urban Development
      Donald Trump just started an Oval Office announcement on a deal with the British-based drug maker Asta Zeneca, for a “most-favored-nation” drug pricing model aimed at making prescription medicines more affordable, by boasting that he would have struck the deal sooner, but “we were interrupted by a rigged election”.Trump went on to repeat the wildly false claim that the discounted prices for American consumers would reduce the price of prescription drugs by up to 1,000%.As Daniel Dale of CNN has explained: “Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications rather than paying for them.” A health economist, Timothy McBride, told the network Trump’s claims are “just not logical,” since a 500% price reduction would mean that a drug that now costs $100 would cost be available for free, with consumers given a $400 rebate.The actual deal includes cutting prices for the government’s Medicaid health plan for low-income Americans and discounted prices through a “TrumpRx” website the president said.AstraZeneca’s chief executive Pascal Soriot stood near Trump in the gold-clad Oval Office as the president made the announcement.Pfizer previously agreed to drop prescription drug prices in the Medicaid program for lower-income Americans to what it charges in other developed countries in exchange for relief from tariffs threatened by Trump.Americans currently pay by far the most for prescription medicines, often nearly three times more than in other developed nations, and Trump has been pressuring drugmakers to lower their prices to what patients pay elsewhere or face stiff tariffs.Last month, he threatened 100% tariffs on drug makers, increasing pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to agree to price cuts and shift manufacturing to the US.Writing on his social media platform, Donald Trump just announced that, in response to what he called China’s “extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade” and new export restrictions, he intends to “impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying” starting on 1 November.The same day, he adds, “we will impose Export Controls on any and all critical software.”That date is after Trump’s planned meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.Our colleague Callum Jones has more on the latest friction in Trump’s trade war with China.The wave of layoffs at federal agencies has reportedly reached the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) now, according to the PBS correspondent Lisa Desjardins.Federal prosecutors in Maryland could seek criminal charges next week against Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, report the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Carol Leonnig and her colleague Ken Dilanian for MSNBC.A grand jury in Maryland has been hearing evidence related to claims that Bolton, a former ally of Trump turned harsh critic, improperly kept classified national security information in his Maryland home.The journalists also report that Ed Martin, a Republican operative who served briefly as Trump’s acting US attorney in the District of Columbia now running the justice department’s “Weaponization Working Group”, has met multiple times with the Trump-appointed acting US attorney in Maryland, Kelly Hayes, on the Bolton case.An indictment on Bolton for illegally retaining classified documents would be the third of a Trump critic in recent weeks, and would echo the indictment of New York’s attorney general, Tish James, in accusing critics of the president of committing crimes he was indicted for after his first term.I’ve been chatting to Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor in the southern district of New York, about the indictment of Letitia James.Roth said it was “extremely distressing” to see prosecutions brought against the president’s perceived political enemies.“I can’t say that I was surprised that the department [under attorney general Pam Bondi] pursued these charges against Tish James,” she added. “That doesn’t lessen my distress … particularly in light of what had been longstanding Department of Justice policy not to pursue an indictment unless prosecutors were convinced that they would be able to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.”Lindsey Halligan, the handpicked and newly installed US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, has pursued the charges against James and former FBI director James Comey, and Roth notes that we could see a wider effort to bring charges against the president’s adversaries in districts throughout the country that are now run by Trump-friendly prosecutors.Much like the charges brought against Comey, Roth underscored that the crimes that James is being accused of are very difficult to prove “even under the best stances” because they require proof of “criminal intent as opposed to an honest mistake or negligence”.The Guardian has independently confirmed that reductions in force (RIFs) are under way at the following departments and agencies:

      Department of Education

      Department of Health and Human Services

      Department of Homeland Security (specifically the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

      Department of the Treasury
      Certain agencies haven’t immediately responded to the Guardian’s request for comment, but other media outlets have reported layoffs are expected at the following:

      Environmental Protection Agency

      Department of Energy

      Department of the Interior

      Department of Housing and Urban Development
      The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed to the Guardian that employees across “multiple divisions” have received reduction-in-force notices. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said this was “a direct consequence of the Democrat-led government shutdown”.He added that HHS under the Biden administration “became a bloated bureaucracy, growing its budget by 38% and its workforce by 17%”.Nixon said that all employees receiving RIF notices were “designated non-essential by their respective divisions”.“HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda,” he added.The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal government workers, has condemned the mass layoffs announced by the White House budget office.“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelley, the union’s president.AFGE has already filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the firings, and a hearing is set for Thursday, 16 October. “We will not stop fighting until every reduction-in-force notice is rescinded,” Kelley added.The Department of Education has also confirmed to the Guardian that their employees will be affected by the reductions in force.An office of management and budget (OMB) spokesperson told the Guardian that the reductions in force that have begun are “substantial”.The official didn’t confirm an exact number, but we’re bringing you the latest as we hear from different agencies and departments about how they stand to be affected. More

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      US farmers caught in Trump-China trade war – who’ll buy the soybeans?

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      At the Purfeerst farm in southern Minnesota, the soybean harvest just wrapped up for the season. The silver grain bins are full of about 100,000 bushels of soybeans, which grab about $10 a piece.This year, though, the fate of the soybeans, and the people whose livelihoods depend on selling them, is up in the air: America’s soybean farmers are stuck in the middle of a trade war between the US and China, the biggest purchaser of soybean exports, used to feed China’s pigs.“We are gonna have to find a home for them soybeans some time soon,” said Matt Purfeerst, a fifth-generation farmer on the family’s land. “They won’t stay in our bins for ever.”No other country comes close to purchasing as many American soybeans as China – last year, it was more than $12bn worth. This year, the country has not purchased a single dollar’s worth, cutting off the country that makes up about half of US soybean exports.While Trump has said he intends some sort of payment to go to soybean farmers hurt by tariffs, an announcement of a specific plan is on hold while the government is shut down. He said in a Truth Social post last week that he would be meeting with the Chinese president soon and “soybeans will be a major topic of discussion”.The White House cast blame on Democrats for the government shutdown for the delay in a response to the Guardian on Wednesday, erroneously claiming they were prioritizing healthcare for migrants over farmers.View image in fullscreen“President Trump, [Treasury] Secretary [Scott] Bessent, and [Agriculture] Secretary [Brooke] Rollins are always in touch about the needs of our farmers, who played a crucial role in the president’s November victory,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress have stalled progress on this issue with their prolonged shutdown to serve illegal immigrants instead of America’s farmers. No decisions have been made, but we look forward to sharing good news soon.”Purfeerst’s family farm grows soybeans and corn, and has some beef cattle. The job is a round-the-clock combination of engineering, business, manual labor, environmental science. And it’s increasingly hard for family farms to make it. Costs for propane, fertilizer and seed have gone up, he said, and the prices for the goods they are selling don’t make up for the increased costs.Soybean farmers have become the “poster child out there right now of how this one particular segment’s getting hurt”, he said. The farm recently welcomed the Democratic US senator Amy Klobuchar for a visit to talk about how the tariffs were playing out, but Purfeerst said political affiliations didn’t matter.“Only 1% of the population is even involved in [agriculture] any more,” he said. “And what gets really challenging is this perception of ag out there, whether it’s on tariffs and prices or environmental issues, farmers kind of seem to be the crosshairs of a lot of it.”Farming areas voted for Trump in 2024, as did much of rural America. One analysis, by Investigate Midwest, showed Trump growing his support among farming-dependent counties in 2024 despite a trade war during his first term that negatively affected farmers.“I’m not gonna get into who I voted for particularly, but I would just have to say, at the time, you got to make decisions who you think is going to be the best leader of the country, and go on with life,” Purfeerst said. “And in four years, you get to vote again. That’s the beauty of our society. It’s not an 80-year regime. It’s a four-year cycle. It’s hard to say what’s gonna come about. I mean, everyone’s got their pros and cons.”View image in fullscreenPurfeerst has options for his soybeans: because of his farm’s location, he can sell domestically to soybean crush facilities in nearby towns, sell on the rail market, or sell in Minneapolis and put product on barges down the Mississippi River. Other soybean farmers, especially those in more remote parts of the midwest where soybeans are mostly produced, aren’t as lucky.Stories from all parts of the country where soybeans are grown have surfaced in recent weeks – in Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana, the Dakotas. Farmers face higher costs for inputs like fertilizer and equipment. They rely on China as a purchaser. Soybeans sitting in bins too long is subject to weather and pests. The prices fluctuate, so it’s a gamble to hold on to it that sometimes can pay off, or sometimes lose money.“Let’s say tomorrow we get a trade deal with China, and it’s favorable to soybeans. All of a sudden you might see this market jump from $10 to $12 in three, four days,” Purfeerst said. “So it makes it extremely challenging from a risk management standpoint of: when do you market your crop, and how many eggs do you put in that basket? The potential is $12, but if we don’t get a trade deal, it could go to $9 … There’s a huge volatility in soybeans.”The soybean industry has been warning for months that China’s exit from the market would be devastating, calling on the Trump administration to come up with a trade deal that spares farmers. The American Soybean Association wrote a letter to Trump in August, saying the country’s soybean farmers were “standing at a trade and financial precipice” and “cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute with our largest customer”.Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, declared the first week of October as soybean week, saying in the announcement that “our soybean farmers are confronting a crisis they haven’t seen since the 1980s”.“They’ve produced a bumper crop this year, just to find out they have nowhere to sell their harvest thanks to Trump’s trade policies,” Walz said. “Minnesota’s got the best beans in the world – I encourage Minnesotans to stand with our farmers and continue to advocate for federal trade reform.”It’s not the first time a Trump trade plan has hurt soybean farmers: in 2018, a trade war led to significant reductions in soybean exports to China. Since then, the market has rebounded, though China has ramped up soybean purchases from Brazil and Argentina, stockpiling imports earlier this year.Republican lawmakers have said they are sympathetic to the farmers and want to find a way to help them. James Comer, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, said this week that soybean farmers were not to blame for the problem they are facing.“They planted that crop assuming that those foreign markets were going to be there,” Comer said in a recent TV appearance. “I think we need to do something to help the soybean farmers.”A bailout is “really just a Band-Aid”, though it’s one that many farmers would welcome as they are getting squeezed right now, Purfeerst said. Most farmers would prefer an open market, without tariffs, for their products, letting the market dictate prices. They don’t want the trade war now to affect a long-term relationship that makes up a significant chunk of market share. There also should be more emphasis put on increasing domestic uses of soybeans, though a long-range plan like that won’t help the farmers who are stuck right now, he said.“There’s farms that are struggling to make money on soybean acres, and you’ve got to remember: whatever payment we’re getting, whatever that dollar amount might be, if we get anything, it’s not just going in our back pocket,” he said. “We’ve got a fertilizer bill. We’ve got to pay the seed bill. There’s a lot of payments. So really, that money might be in the farmer’s hands for a month, until it gets spent on inputs for next year.” More

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      US to send 200 troops to Israel to support and monitor ceasefire deal, reports say

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      US troops have been sent to Israel as part of the peace deal approved on Thursday to support and help monitor the ceasefire, according to multiple news reports.Senior US officials told reporters that 200 troops will initially be on the ground with a “civil-military coordination center” operated by US Central Command to help facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid as well as logistical and security assistance into the territory wracked by two years of war, the Associated Press reported, citing two officials who confirmed the report on the condition of anonymity to discuss details not authorized for release.Reuters and ABC News also reported on military troops being sent to Israel.The troops are part of a broader team that also includes partner nations, non-governmental organizations and private-sector entities there to help monitor the peace deal and the transition to a civilian government in Gaza, US officials said.US service members have already begun arriving in the region from around the globe, according to one of the officials, and will continue to travel to the region over the weekend to begin planning and establishing the center. American troops will not be sent into Gaza, they said, and the coordination center will be staffed by about 200 US service members who have expertise in transportation, planning, security, logistics and engineering.Israel and Hamas agreed to pause hostilities in Gaza on Thursday, a deal Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social network, saying it was the first step to “Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace”. Many questions remain on next steps, including Hamas disarmament, a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and a future government in the territory.Both sides agreed to a hostage-prisoner exchange that would free about 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be alive and the remains of others who have died, and roughly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails.Israeli bombs continued to land in Gaza, killing a reported 30 people after the deal was announced on Wednesday, but Palestinians celebrated in the rubble-strewn streets left devastated by the war, even as strikes continued.More than 2 million people have been displaced in Gaza, and humanitarian officials eagerly awaited permission from Israel to deliver badly needed aid there. From March to May this year, Israel imposed a total blockade of supplies into the area, and famine was declared in parts of Gaza in August. Only 20% of the aid needed has been delivered over the last several months, according to the UN, which said roughly 170,000 metric tons of food, medicine and other supplies is ready for distribution.After the announcement on Wednesday, the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, called for all of Gaza’s entry points to open so aid could be delivered at “a much, much greater scale”.“Given the level of needs, the level of starvation, the level of misery and despair, will require a massive collective effort, and that’s what we’re mobilized for,” Fletcher told AP. “We are absolutely ready to roll and deliver at scale.”More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since the war began, most of them civilians. Roughly another 169,000 have been injured. The collapse of health systems, schools and access to food has also taken a severe toll, with at least 400 additional deaths related to malnutrition, according to the UN, including more than 100 children. Only 1.5% of cropland in Gaza has been left able to be farmed, with water and soil left polluted by munitions and fires.As Israel’s forces withdraw, part of the agreed-upon process that will leave them 53% of the territory, according to an Israeli government spokesperson, questions remain about how the next steps to provide stabilization and reconstruction will unfold.The remarks from US officials provide some of the first details on how the ceasefire deal would be monitored and how the US military would have a role in that effort.Jason Burke and the Associated Press contributed to this story More

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      Arizona sheriff’s office misused millions set aside to remedy racial profiling

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      The sheriff’s office for metro Phoenix spent millions of dollars budgeted for compliance costs in a racial profiling case over Joe Arpaio’s immigration crackdowns on things that had little or nothing to do with a court-ordered overhaul of the agency, according to an expert’s report.The report released on Wednesday criticized the use of compliance money by the Maricopa county sheriff’s office to fund personnel costs and tasks, either in part or in full, that are not connected to the overhaul.It also pointed out inappropriate spending: $2.8m for surplus body-worn camera licenses that went beyond the court’s orders; $1.5m in renovations in the relocation of an internal affairs office; over $1.3m to buy 42 vehicles; and an $11,000 golf cart to bring staff from headquarters to the internal affairs operation, even though the department was leasing parking space at the latter location.For over a decade, Maricopa county taxpayers have picked up the bill for remedying constitutional violations found in a 2013 profiling verdict over then sheriff Arpaio’s traffic patrols targeting immigrants.The racial profiling case centered on 20 large-scale traffic patrols launched by Arpaio that targeted immigrants from January 2008 through October 2011. That led to the profiling verdict and expensive court-ordered overhauls of the agency’s traffic patrol operations and, later, its internal affairs unit.The county says $323m has been spent so far on legal expenditures, a staff that monitors the sheriff’s department’s progress and the agency’s compliance costs. The county has said the total is expected to reach $352m by July 2026.The federal judge presiding over the case expressed concerns about transparency in spending by the sheriff’s office and ordered a review, leading to the blistering report from budget analysts. The report was prepared by budget analysts picked by the case’s monitor.The report concluded 72% of the $226m in spending by the sheriff’s office from February 2014 to late September 2024 was either wrongly attributed or “improperly prorated” to a compliance fund.Budget analysts who reviewed hundreds of employee records over roughly that time period found an average of 70% of all positions funded by compliance money were “inappropriately assigned or only partially related to compliance.”Those expenditures were unrelated to or unnecessary for compliance, lacked appropriate justification or resulted from purposeful misrepresentation by the sheriff’s office, county leaders or both, the budget analysts wrote.Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s office released a statement saying its attorneys are reviewing the report to identify areas of common concern and any findings it may dispute. Sheridan, who took office this year, is the fourth sheriff to grapple with the case.Raul Piña, a longtime member of a community advisory board created to help improve trust in the sheriff’s office, said the report opens up a broader conversation about the integrity of the sheriff’s office.“You will have to double-check now whenever the agency talks about statistics,” Piña said.Beginning earlier this year, county officials ramped up their criticism of the spending. They said the agency shouldn’t still be under the court’s supervision a dozen years after the verdict and shouldn’t still be paying such hefty bills, including about $30m to those who monitor the agency on behalf of the judge since around 2014.The report criticized Maricopa county and its governing board for a lack of oversight over the spending.Thomas Galvin, chairman of the county’s governing board and a leading critic of the continued court supervision, said the board’s legal counsel is reviewing the report. “The board has confidence in MCSO’s budgeting team and will respond accordingly,” Galvin said.Since the profiling verdict, the sheriff’s office has been criticized for disparate treatment of Hispanic and Black drivers in a series of studies of its traffic stops. The latest study, however, shows significant improvements. The agency’s also dogged by a backlog of internal affairs cases. While the agency has made progress on some fronts and garnered favorable compliance grades in certain areas, it hasn’t yet been deemed fully compliant with the court-ordered overhauls. More