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      in US Politics

      National guard remains in Chicago area as judge to rule on Trump deployment

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      Hundreds of national guard troops remained in the Chicago area as city and Illinois officials awaited a judge’s decision to stop Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the nation’s third-largest city.It was still unclear where specifically the Trump administration would send the troops who reported to an army training site south-west of Chicago, which was laden with extra fencing and tarps put up to block the public’s view of the facility late on Wednesday evening.As they arrived this week, trucks marked Emergency Disaster Services pulled in and out, dropping off portable toilets and other supplies. Trailers were set up in rows.“The federal government has not communicated with us in any way about their troop movements,” the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, told reporters. “I can’t believe I have to say ‘troop movements’ in an American city, but that is what we’re talking about here.”Roughly 500 soldiers – 200 from the Texas national guard and 300 from the Illinois national guard – were mobilized to the city for an “initial period of 60 days”, according to statement issued from US Northern Command, part of the defense department, which called the operation a “federal protection mission”.The guard members are in the city to protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) buildings and other federal facilities and law enforcement personnel, according to Northern Command.A small number of troops have started protecting federal property in the Chicago area, officials told the Associated Press.Footage of uniformed troops arriving early on Thursday morning at an Ice processing facility in the suburban community of Broadview, which has become a focal point of protests. They carried shields and what appeared to be luggage.In a statement, the village of Broadview said three vans carrying 45 members of the Texas national guard had arrived at the federal building.“During their patrols, Broadview police officers observed the vans parked in the rear of 2000 25th Ave and all of the guards were sleeping. We let them sleep undisturbed. We hope that they will extend the same courtesy in the coming days to Broadview residents who deserve a good night’s sleep, too,” the statement said.While the deployment came as part of a crackdown threatened by Trump, in response to unsubstantiated claims that big cities run by Democrats are overwhelmed with crime, the stated mission says military would be “performing ground activities to protect federal functions, personnel, and property”.It marks Trump’s fourth deployment of national guard troops on to the streets of a major US city in as many months, following deployments in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Memphis. In all cases except Memphis, it has been against the wishes of state and city leaders.Trump repeatedly has described Chicago in hostile terms, calling it a “hellhole” of crime, although police statistics show significant drops in most crimes, including homicides.A judge will also have a role in determining how many boots are on the streets: a court hearing was being held on Thursday after a request by Illinois and Chicago to declare the guard deployment illegal.The state of Illinois urged April Perry, a federal judge, to order the national guard to stand down, calling the deployment a constitutional crisis. The government “plowed ahead anyway”, attorney Christopher Wells said. “Now, troops are here.”Wells’ arguments opened an extraordinary hearing where heavy public turnout at the downtown Chicago courthouse caused officials to open an overflow room with a video feed of the hearing.Eric Hamilton, a justice department lawyer, said the Chicago area was rife with “tragic lawlessness”. He discussed an incident last weekend in which a Border Patrol vehicle was reportedly boxed in and an agent shot a woman in response.But in a court filing, the city and state lawyers say protests at the Ice building in Broadview have “never come close to stopping federal immigration enforcement”.“The president is using the Broadview protests as a pretext,” they wrote. “The impending federal troop deployment in Illinois is the latest episode in a broader campaign by the president’s administration to target jurisdictions the president dislikes.”It’s one of several major court fights on the deployment of federal troops to American cities.Also Thursday, a federal appeals court heard arguments over whether Trump had the authority to take control of 200 Oregon national guard troops. The president had planned to deploy them in Portland, where there have been mostly small nightly protests outside an Ice building.US district judge Karin Immergut on Saturday granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Oregon troops’ deployment, and on Sunday blocked the deployment of any national guard troops to the city.The case at the heart of Sunday’s decision was brought by the states of Oregon and California, whose national troops Trump had sent to Portland. Two dozen other states with a Democratic attorney general or governor signed a court filing in support of the legal challenge by California and Oregon. Twenty others, led by Iowa, backed the Trump administration.The case centers around the nearly 150-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the military’s role in enforcing domestic laws. However, Trump has said he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to dispatch active duty military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.“This is about authoritarianism. It’s about stoking fear,” Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said. “It’s about breaking the constitution that would give him that much more control over our American cities.”Trump, meanwhile, sent barbs from Washington, saying on social media that Pritzker and Johnson, both Democrats, “should be in jail” for failing to protect federal agents during immigration enforcement crackdowns.Asked about Trump’s wish to jail him, Pritzker extended his arms and told MSNBC: “If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me.”Meanwhile, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said the department was “doubling down” by buying buildings in Chicago – and also Portland – for Ice personnel to operate from.“We’re purchasing more buildings in Chicago to operate out of. We’re going to not back off,” she said. “In fact, we’re doubling down, and we’re going to be in more parts of Chicago in response to the people there.”At the same time in Memphis, a small group of troops were helping on Wednesday with the Memphis Safe Task Force, said a state military department spokesperson who did not specify the exact role or number of the guard members. The taskforce is a collection of about a dozen federal law enforcement agencies ordered by Trump to fight crime.Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, who has welcomed the guard, has said previously that he would not expect more than 150 guard members to be sent to the city.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      in Elections

      Dominion, voting firm targeted by false 2020 election claims, sold to new owner

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      Dominion Voting Systems, the company that makes widely used voting equipment in the United States that became synonymous with election conspiracies and Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, has been sold.The company was purchased by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican Missouri election official who founded KnowInk, which makes electronic pollbooks used at voting sites across the country. Leindecker purchased Dominion under a new company called Liberty Vote. Leiendecker, served as the elections director in St Louis from 2005 until 2012, according to his LinkedIn, a period during which he would have overlapped with Ed Martin, a staunch Trump ally at the justice department who served as chairman of the St Louis board of elections from 2005 to 2006.Leiendecker said in a press release the acquisition represented “a new chapter for American elections – one where trust is rebuilt from the ground up”, pledging to deliver election technology that prioritizes “paper-based transparency, security, and simplicity so that voters can be assured that every ballot is filled-in accurately and fairly counted”.“As of today, Dominion is gone. Liberty Vote assumes full ownership and operational control,” the company said in a statement.The sale comes after Dominion spent years in court defending its reputation and pursuing damages against news outlets and Trump allies who baselessly said the company’s equipment had flipped votes in 2020. In 2023, it reached a landmark $787.5m settlement with Fox over false claims about the election. The private equity firm Staple Street capital bought a 76% stake in Dominion for $38m in 2018.Newsmax, another far-right network, agreed to pay $67m to settle a libel lawsuit against Dominion earlier this year. Dominion has also reached settlements with One America News, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani over false claims over the 2020 election.Dominion was founded and headquartered in Toronto, and also operated from Denver, Colorado. The company developed software in offices across the United States, Canada, and Serbia. Its systems were used in over half the United States during the 2024 election.Financial terms of the sale were not disclosed.The newly renamed Liberty Vote said it would use hand-marked paper ballots, maintain 100% American ownership with domestic staffing and software development, and implement rigorous third-party auditing standards.The company said its approach would ensure “compliance with President Trump’s executive order” on election security, though specific details were not provided. A 25 March executive order demands states to use voting systems that have a “voter verifiable paper record” (every state except Louisiana already uses paper ballots and paper records, according to the non-profit verified voting). The order also seeks to ban equipment in which a voter’s choices are encoded in a QR code.KnowInk is “highly regarded” in the election community, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of the elections group and a widely-respected election administration consultant.“I’m confident they would not be buying Dominion if there was any possibility they could not offer the same great services and support that they currently provide election officials with their e-pollbook and voter registration systems,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Trump is like a juggernaut’: how the Gaza ceasefire deal was done

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      It is a well-known adage in politics that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Except when Donald Trump is involved, in which case there is only one parent.Nevertheless, many countries and individuals have a right to step forward to claim an authorial role in the deal that it is hoped will bring an end to the two-year war in Gaza.But it is a sign of the collective nature of the effort of the past few months that so many can credibly claim a role, including the US president, who after many false starts was finally persuaded to focus, end the fantasy of driving tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and instead spell out to Benjamin Netanyahu the versions of victory the Israeli prime minister could and could not have.The turning point was a meeting in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly chaired by Trump, soon after his baroque speech to the gathering. Trump described the sidelines chat as his most important meeting at the UN. In the encounter organised by the United Arab Emirates, he set out for the first time his then 20-point plan for peace in front of a group of Arab and Muslim states that could form the backbone of any stabilisation force that entered Gaza in the event of a ceasefire.By then Trump, with the help of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, had been convinced to change his mind on two critical issues. First, Palestinians should not be driven from Gaza and Israel should not rule the territory. “Gaza should be for Gazans,” one said.That meant Trump dropping the displacement rhetoric he deployed earlier in the year, when he triggered widespread alarm by speaking of plans to develop a “Gaza Riviera”.View image in fullscreenSecondly, Trump was persuaded a “day after” plan for the future of Gaza would not complicate the negotiations on a ceasefire-hostage release agreement by adding new contested ingredients, but was the precondition for success. A UK diplomat explained Blair’s thinking: “Hamas was not going to give up unless it knew the Israelis were going to get out and the Israelis were not going to get out and stop occupying Gaza unless they knew Hamas were not going to be in government. Unless you resolved the question of who governs Gaza you cannot bring the thing to an end.”That in turn made it easier for the Arab states to put political pressure on Hamas to negotiate since they could point to a route towards Palestinian statehood, something that has always been their precondition for reconciliation with Israel. The Arab states had also put their names to demands that Hamas stand aside and disarm.One of those involved in persuading the US president said: “People don’t want to hear this but the advantage of Trump is that once he decides to do something he is like a juggernaut. And he really did put pressure on the Israelis.”Trump’s mood towards Israel was clouded by Netanyahu’s unilateral decision to bomb Doha on 9 September in the hope of wiping out Hamas negotiators. Trump had not been consulted, but the US assurances were met with scepticism. As a result Netanyahu, not a man prone to contrition, was ordered to apologise and say he would respect Qatar’s sovereignty in future.View image in fullscreenTo repair relations fully with Qatar, the host of main US airbase in the Middle East, Trump issued an extraordinary executive order saying any future attack on the emirate would be treated as an attack on the US. All this meant the US leader was better disposed to the Gulf states’ vision of a new Middle East. In a sign he was prepared to push the Israeli government hard, in a way Joe Biden had not, Trump told Israel there would be no further annexations in the West Bank.From the very start of the sidelines meeting at the UN in September, the aim of the Arab states was to bind Trump personally into the process. Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, said: “We count on you and your leadership … to end this war and to help the people of Gaza.” He said Israel’s real objective was “to destroy Gaza, to render housing, livelihoods, education, and medical care impossible, stripping away the very foundations of human life”.The concept that Trump personally was central to a solution – indeed its guarantor – flattered the US president who offered himself up as the chair of the peace board, the body that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.In one sense, he would be just a name plate, but to the extent he has a hinterland, it is construction. That means there is a possibility he will remain engaged, for the moment at least.Those observing him said Trump began to feel he had a serious opportunity to solve a conflict he variously said had lasted 3,000 or 600 years, in contrast to his failed attempt in Ukraine. The prospect of winning the Nobel peace prize, Trump’s obsession, hovered once more into view.View image in fullscreenThat meant that once his plan was published Trump did not let go, but kept the pressure up on Hamas, warning of the group’s annihilation if it did not release the hostages in return for 250 Palestinians. But neither did Trump let Israel backtrack. Speed and momentum became of the essence.It was the seniority of the negotiators who went to the talks in Egypt that revealed the stars were finally aligning and Hamas would be forced into releasing all the hostages it held, even though Israel would not immediately leave all of Gaza. The scenes were extraordinary enough in that the Hamas negotiators were – albeit through mediators – holding talks with a government that had tried to assassinate them a month earlier. By the time they started the participants sensed a deal was unavoidable.The arrival of Kushner, the head of the intelligence office of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İbrahim Kalın, and the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, confirmed a breakthrough was imminent.During the talks, Hamas negotiators led by its leader Khalil al-Hayya, Mohammad al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general of Islamic Jihad, and Jamil Mezher, the deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, sought to clarify the names of the Palestinians to be released, the mechanism of the release of the Israeli hostages and the “day after” aspects of the agreement, poring over the maps showing a withdrawal of Israel’s forces.But Hamas was told while the critical “day after” principles stood, the details would have to wait for a second linked negotiation. The risk for Hamas now is that it loses its leverage upon handing over the hostages – and that fears Israel will then refuse to engage with the plans for Gaza’s future or find a pretext to restart the fighting will be realised. The domestic brake on Netanyahu resuming the fighting – the demand to save the hostages – would have gone.Here Trump’s continued willingness to keep up the pressure on Netanyahu was critical, and is acknowledged by Hamas in its statements referring to the US president as guarantor of the plan. On Fox News, Trump said he had told Netanyahu that “Israel cannot fight the world”, adding: “And he understands that very well.” He said: “You will see people coexisting and Gaza will be rebuilt.”By contrast Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu, said: “There’s no phase two. That’s clear to everyone, right? Phase two might happen someday, but it’s unrelated to what’s just been signed.”Many elements of Trump’s 20-point plan are being addressed by diplomats from the US, Europe and Arab states at a separate gathering in Paris on Wednesday.View image in fullscreenOn the agenda are issues such as the Hamas handover of weapons; its exclusion from future administrations; the mandate of an international peacekeeping force; the delivery of resumed aid flows; and the future relationship between Gaza and the West Bank as the nucleus of a future Palestinian state. On almost all these, there have been deep differences between Israel on the one hand, and Europe and the Arab states on the other.But in a promising sign, US officials will attend this meeting, suggesting Washington does not favour an armed status quo.At the centre of these discussions is Blair, who is to sit on the peace board or interim government that will oversee the Palestinian technocrats that help implement reconstruction plans. Blair will have to convince the Palestinian Authority that he is not offering a colonial-esque arrangement, as the former prime minister says it fears. But he is unlikely to do the job unless he has real powers, something he feels was not given when he was Middle East special envoy to the quartet.Arab leaders are seeking assurances that the international stabilisation force that eventually enters Gaza has a UN security council mandate, and that there is a clear plan to treat Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity.One of the most difficult issues unresolved in the rushed talks in Egypt is the timing of the Hamas weapons handover. The group may be willing to deliver its arms to an Arab-run authority, or a Palestinian civil police force, but not to Israel. Some diplomats even believe Hamas may feel the need to take a new political course, something it has been close to doing before. “Gazans are going to demand to know what the past two years were about,” one diplomat said.One diplomat involved in the talks said: “The tragedy is that this could have all been agreed 20 months ago, all the elements were there. The key Israeli objective – which is why it is a tragedy this war has gone on so long – was the removal of Hamas from future rule, and that was obtainable a long time ago.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘You cannot undo a wrongful execution’: push to halt killing of Texas man in ‘shaken baby’ case

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      At 6pm next Thursday, barring a last-minute reprieve, Robert Roberson will become the first person in America to be executed under the theory of “shaken baby syndrome”, a medical diagnosis from the 1970s that is so disputed it is now widely denounced as junk science.Roberson, 58, will enter the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas, where he will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs. He will be put to death having been convicted of shaking to death his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002.A coalition of advocates is calling for the execution to be called off, arguing Roberson is innocent of a crime that never even happened. They include several people exonerated from shaken baby syndrome convictions; more than 80 bipartisan Texas lawmakers; the lead detective in Roberson’s original investigation; and members of his trial jury.Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Guardian that not only was her client’s life in the balance – so too was justice. “If Robert is executed next week, with all that is known about the profound due-process problems on top of his actual innocence, then Texas would have no legitimate justice system.”She added: “How could you have confidence in a system that cannot fix a case like this, where the science has been so thoroughly discredited?”A year ago, Roberson came within two hours of dying by lethal injection and was only saved by a frenzied late-night intervention by Texas legislators. In an interview with the Guardian from death row shortly before that execution date, he denied having shaken his daughter.“I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that to be on nobody: to lose a child, especially if you tried to do right and you loved her and tried to get to know her, then to be accused.”Now Sween and Roberson’s legal team are scrambling yet again to prevent him becoming a statistic – as the first person on death row to be judicially killed on the back of disputed shaken baby syndrome.Last week his defense team petitioned the US fifth circuit court of appeals requesting a federal review of new evidence that points to an alternative explanation for Nikki’s death. The petition includes expert testimony from 10 medical pathologists who question the findings of Nikki’s 2002 autopsy.The experts conclude that the child’s brain swelling was not caused by violent shaking, but was the result of serious infection. Nikki had undiagnosed pneumonia at the time she slumped into a coma, according to the experts, exacerbated by improper prescription of dangerous medicines and a short fall from the bed in which she was sleeping.The petition also highlights that a few years ago Roberson was found to have autism, a condition which had gone undiagnosed at the time of his daughter’s death. His lawyers argue that this helps explain how flat and unemotional he appeared when he brought the dying girl into hospital, a demeanor that was used against him at trial as evidence of guilt.A separate petition has been pending for eight months at the state’s top criminal court, the Texas court of criminal appeals. The 163-page document filed by Roberson’s lawyers in February argues that science behind shaken baby syndrome had been so undermined by new evidence that today “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder”.A decision from the court is expected any day.Last year, the same criminal appeals court overturned the 35-year sentence of Andrew Roark, who had been found guilty of injuring his girlfriend’s 13-month-old child in 1997. The judges found that key scientific testimony at Roark’s trial had been unreliable, and concluded that if it were presented to a jury today it would “likely yield an acquittal”.There are glaring similarities between the Roark case and Roberson’s conviction. Both men became the subject of shaken baby syndrome accusations on the back of a diagnosis from the same child abuse specialist, Janet Squires, delivered from the same hospital.“The similarities between the cases are overwhelming,” Sween said.The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, continues to stand by Roberson’s death sentence, describing the efforts of the condemned man’s supporters as “11th-hour, one-sided, extra­ju­di­cial stunts that attempt to obscure facts and rewrite his past”.In an unusual move, Paxton secured next week’s execution date while the prisoner’s petition was still pending before the appeals court.Some of Nikki’s other family members are also pressing for the execution to go ahead.Shaken baby syndrome (SBS), which often now goes under the name “abusive head trauma”, was developed in the early 1970s to diagnose children who became severely ill or died from internal brain injuries without necessarily showing outward signs of harm. One of its earliest proponents was the British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch.View image in fullscreenBy the 1980s the theory had hardened into the presumption that a triad of symptoms in children under two years old conclusively indicated abusive shaking. If those three symptoms were indicated – brain swelling, bleeding between the tissues covering the brain, and bleeding behind the eyes – then a crime must have been committed.In the past 15 years medical understanding has grown. It is now widely recognised that other factors can lie behind such brain injuries, including underlying conditions, infections, and even relatively short falls.Studies have also shown that it is physically unlikely that severe brain trauma is caused by shaking alone, without there also being visible injuries to the spine or skull. In Roberson’s case, Nikki displayed no such injuries.Guthkelch himself warned in 2012 that the three symptoms he had identified should not be taken as categoric signs of abuse. “There was not a vestige of proof when the name was suggested that shaking, and nothing else, causes the triad,” he said.In 2023 a group of global experts drawn from many disciplines including pediatrics, pathology, ophthalmology, neurology, physics and biomechanics reviewed the literature on SBS. Their work was published as a book, Shaken Baby Syndrome: Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy.The book’s co-editor, Keith Findley, said that “we consistently reached the conclusion that the scientific underpinnings for shaken baby syndrome are just not there. This is not to deny that abuse happens. It’s to say that medical findings alone simply cannot be a reliable basis for diagnosing child abuse.”Findley, who is founder of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, said: “It is absolutely horrifying to think we are days away from killing a man based on scientific assertions that are known to be wrong”.As medical doubts have grown about the reliability of an SBS diagnosis, so too have concerns about its application in criminal cases. Since 1989, 39 parents and caregivers have been exonerated in the US having been convicted largely on the grounds of a faulty SBS hypothesis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.Two of those exonerations were in Texas, including Roark’s last November.Josh Burns, 49, is an SBS exoneree. In 2014, when he was working as a Delta Air Lines pilot and living in Michigan, his daughter Naomi suffered a bout of vomiting and he was accused of having harmed her by violent shaking.The girl was taken into foster care, and he was convicted of child abuse and spent a year in jail. It took him 10 years to clear his name.An investigation by the state’s conviction integrity unit last year concluded there had been no reliable evidence of harm. Naomi’s symptoms could be explained by dehydration caused by a stomach bug.Burns and his family paid a devastating price for his wrongful conviction. He lost his job as a pilot, and his family was forced to move out of Michigan – ironically, they ended up in Texas, where Roberson is now scheduled to be executed.“I know how gut-wrenching and soul-crushing it is to be accused of harming the person that you love the most,” Burns told the Guardian. He has joined other SBS exonerees to campaign for a reprieve for Roberson, viscerally aware that there is a critical difference between his plight and Roberson’s.“You can undo a wrongful conviction like mine,” he said. “But you cannot undo a wrongful execution.”Audrey Edmunds, 64, has also joined the campaign to save Roberson. She was babysitting a neighbor’s child, Natalie, in Wisconsin in 1995 when the girl fell ill and died.She was convicted a year later of first-degree reckless homicide under the SBS hypothesis. At trial key facts, including that Natalie had visited the doctor 24 times in the 27 weeks before her death, were glossed over.Edmunds served 11 years of an 18-year sentence, before the forensic pathologist in her case recanted his own testimony having taken on board changes in scientific understanding. In 2008 she was released and all charges against her dismissed.“Mr Roberson should never have been put on death row,” Edmunds said. “Executing him would be a crime. He has been through more than enough.”She said that she saw strong parallels between her case and Roberson’s. “They checked into junk science. They went down a one-way road, and didn’t look at all the other factors.”Texas was the first state in the country to allow prisoners to challenge their sentences on grounds of junk science. Since its inception in 2013, the so-called “junk science writ” has been taken up by about 70 death row prisoners.None of their challenges have been successful. More

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      in US Politics

      US shutdown deadlock deepens as senators reject competing bills

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      The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.Democrats are demanding that any bill to fund the government be paired with an array of healthcare-centered provisions, including an extension of premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans. Those expire at the end of the year, and costs are set to rise for the plans’ roughly 20 million enrollees if they are not renewed.Donald Trump has sought to pressure the Democrats to accept the GOP’s proposal, which would only extend funding through 21 November. On Tuesday, the White House office of management and budget released a memo arguing that federal workers were not entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law saying they should be.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, poured cold water on that prospect at a press conference the following day, saying: “I think it is statutory law that federal employees be paid. And that’s my position. I think they should be.”Both parties otherwise remained unmoved in their demands. The House of Representatives passed the GOP’s bill on a near party-line vote last month, and Johnson has kept the chamber out of session ever since in a bid to force Senate Democrats to approve it.At his press conference, the speaker alleged that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer was opposing the Republican bill out of fear from a primary challenge by the “communists” in his party.“They are worried about the Marxist flank in their Democrat party,” Johnson said.“He’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left. I’ve noted that Chuck Schumer is a very far-left politician, but he is not far enough left for the communists, and they’re coming for him, and so he has to put up his dukes and show a fight.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer once again faulted Republicans for refusing to negotiate on the Democrats’ healthcare demands. The Senate’s majority leader John Thune has said he will discuss the ACA tax credit issue, but only when government funding is restored.“We can do both: fix healthcare and reopen the government. This is not an either-or thing, which Republicans are making it. The American people don’t like it,” Schumer said.While both parties’s rank-and-file lawmakers have appeared united around their leaders’ strategies, the GOP suffered a high-profile defection on Monday when far-right lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene backed negotiations over the tax credits. However in the days since, no other Republicans have publicly joined her.Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican congresswoman representing a swing district, has received bipartisan support for legislation that would extend the credits for a year, and is viewed a potential compromise in the funding standoff.At a press conference on Tuesday, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called the idea a “nonstarter”.“It was introduced by the same people who just permanently extended massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors,” Jeffries said, referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans passed this year without Democratic votes. More

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      in US Politics

      Why Tony Blair just can’t kick the habit of imperial interference in the Middle East | Oliver Eagleton

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      “There are two types of politician,” Tony Blair observed in 2012. “Reality creators and reality managers.” While postwar politics was generally a matter of steady management, he claimed, the emerging order called for more creativity, “both in the economy and foreign policy”. Only a particular type of visionary leader was fit for the task.More than a decade later, Blair has now joined forces with the pre-eminent reality-creator, Donald Trump, to draft a hallucinatory 20-point plan for Gaza. It aims to turn the devastated Strip into what seems to resemble a colonial protectorate: cleansed of armed conflict, buzzing with development projects and a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow, and overseen by an international “board of peace” with Trump himself as chair.The authors of the programme have not explained how they intend to impose it on a resistant population, or how they will persuade Hamas to disarm and concede defeat. So there is a high likelihood that the Blair-Trump fantasy will remain just that. Whatever its fortunes, though, it is a clear reflection of our historical moment, representing the most recent mutation of an imperial worldview that has already left a trail of destruction across the Middle East.For Blair, “the economy and foreign policy” have long been entwined. His military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan tried to spread the virtues of the market to supposedly backward nations. The privatisation of resources created new investment opportunities, while a wide range of profiteers, from weapons dealers to security contractors, made a killing off the wars themselves.Upon leaving office in 2007, Blair immediately took up a post as Middle East envoy for the so-called Quartet: the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia. His work in Palestine displayed the same unerring faith in free enterprise. He proposed a series of “industrial parks” to attract foreign investment, advocated eccentric agribusiness and tourism schemes, and promoted other ventures that raised questions about possible conflicts of interest: while being paid £2m per year as a JP Morgan adviser, for example, he was accused of using his Quartet role to advance the interests of JP Morgan clients. (Blair denied the claims, insisting he did not know about the links between the bank he worked for and the companies it served.)As envoy, Blair often bypassed or rejected political solutions – fighting vigorously against Palestinian attempts to win statehood at the UN – and instead treated economics as the route to progress. His diplomatic activities seemed to be based on the notion that peace would naturally follow prosperity. If securing the latter was the task of the intrepid statesman, then strong ties to the business sector could perhaps be framed as an asset.Yet Blair’s tenure in the Middle East brought no diminution of the conflict. In 2012, a senior Palestinian official gave a succinct assessment of his record: “Useless, useless, useless.” Still, undeterred by failure and fond of dramatic political comebacks, the former prime minister now appears to be seeking to apply the same logic to Gaza. Since the early months of the war, he has reportedly been crafting his plan for the “day after”.Staff from his thinktank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), participated in a project that appeared to endorse ethnic cleansing in the territory and outlined what could be built atop its mass graves: a “Trump riviera”, an “Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone”, “regional datacentres”. Although Blair’s organisation claimed it had no meaningful involvement in the plan, and rejected the idea of displacing Palestinians, there are a number of continuities with his own blueprint, details of which were soon leaked to the press.Drawn up with the help of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the 21-page document suggests reconstructing Gaza through “public-private partnerships”, forged by a “commercially driven authority, led by business professionals and tasked with generating investable projects with real financial returns”. Hamas would be demobilised and a small unelected executive would be installed. This would include Blair himself in a prominent role, plus “leading international figures with executive and financial expertise” and “at least one qualified Palestinian representative (potentially from the business or security sector)”. An international stabilisation force would meanwhile put down “threats to public order”.View image in fullscreenBlair met Kushner and Trump in the White House on 27 August and his proposals got a warm welcome from the president. They have since been refined and repackaged as the Trump “peace plan”. As with previous versions of the initiative, the emphasis is on creating a Gaza that is “conducive to attracting investment”, and in which Israel will continue to reign supreme. Blair is primed to take charge of governing the Strip until some unspecified future point when day-to-day administration may be returned to a “reformed” Palestinian Authority.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe practical issues are glaring. Which states would be irresponsible enough to send troops to serve this novel dictatorship? How can it hope to sustain itself with no mandate nor legitimacy? Even more striking, however, is the extent to which the plan signals the overlap between Blair’s ethos and Trump’s.It is not unreasonable to suggest that Blair might see a business opportunity beneath the rubble of Gaza. To figure out who may benefit, we can look at his network of paymasters. Since 2021, Larry Ellison, founder of the tech company Oracle, has donated or pledged £257m to the TBI. The thinktank has, in turn, transformed into what one commentator has called an “Oracle dealership”: promoting the company’s software around the globe, including in impoverished countries where it has been criticised for potentially “trapping” and “indebting” users. Ellison is also a prominent supporter of Israel who has given millions to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and, according to Haaretz, once offered Benjamin Netanyahu a seat on the Oracle board. Were Blair to rule over Gaza – perhaps establishing “regional datacentres” in line with the TBI-linked plan – it is possible that Ellison could wield major influence.The TBI has also received huge sums from the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, while Blair has been given a lucrative advisory contract by the UAE state-owned investment firm Mubadala. All three states have readily endorsed the plan for Gaza. Once the besieged enclave is opened for investment, they may well be first in line. Blair’s work for these petro-monarchies tallies with his involvement in the fossil fuel industry, having taken cash from a BP-led consortium, the oil company PetroSaudi and the South Korean UI Energy Corporation, which has interests in the Middle East. Given that Israel has recently granted new licences to explore for oil and gas off the Mediterranean coast, such connections could prove significant later down the line.In one sense, then, this “peace plan” could simply be read as an extension of Blair’s belief in market-led development. Yet this chapter in the annals of colonialism also has a uniquely Trumpian twist. Visions of a new world order that underpinned earlier regime-change projects are gone. Here politics is reduced to dealmaking, grand strategy to crude self-interest. The fusion of public power and private profit is complete. Blair may be creating new realities, but few would want to inhabit them.

      Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review and author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right

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      Mamdani attends Israelis for Peace vigil after his 7 October statement draws ire from Israel

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      The New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday evening attended a vigil in Manhattan convened by Israelis for Peace, an anti-occupation group of Israelis in New York who have rallied weekly since 2023 to call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.Sitting in Union Square alongside New York City comptroller Brad Lander, his one-time rival for the Democratic nomination who has been campaigning for him, Mamdani listened as speakers at the event – which marked the two-year anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel – called for an end to the killing and to Israel’s occupation, and for equal rights for Palestinians.Earlier in the day, Mamdani drew ire from Israel over his statement on the anniversary in which he commemorated both the Israeli victims from that day and Palestinian victims from Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza.“Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more. I mourn these lives and pray for the safe return of every hostage still held and for every family whose lives were torn apart by these atrocities,” Mamdani said in the statement on Tuesday.He denounced Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government for launching a “genocidal war” in Gaza as well. He also accused the US government of being “complicit”.“A death toll that now far exceeds 67,000; with the Israeli military bombing homes, hospitals, and schools into rubble,” Mamdani wrote. “Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief itself has run out of language. I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered.”He said the last two years had “demonstrated the very worst of humanity” and called for an end to Israeli “occupation and apartheid”.Mamdani’s statement prompted a sharp rebuke from the Israeli foreign ministry on X, accusing him of “acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” and “spreading Hamas’s fake genocide campaign”.“By repeating Hamas’s lies, he excuses terror and normalizes antisemitism. He stands with Jews only when they are dead. Shameful,” the post said.Israel stands widely accused of committing genocide in Gaza, where its ongoing military assault has killed tens of thousands of civilians, some 20,000 of them children, caused famine and mass starvation, and razed much of the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.Mamdani is no stranger to criticism for his views on the Israeli government and its war in Gaza, and the issue has proved a major flashpoint in the mayoral race.He has won significant support from certain segments of the Jewish community particularly among younger and more progressive voters, and faces stronger opposition from more conservative groups. A recent Marist poll found 35% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani, as does the same proportion supporting Cuomo. (The poll was taken before Eric Adams dropped out of the race.)The democratic socialist has faced criticism over his past refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”, which some view as a call to violence. He has since said he would discourage use of the phrase. He also recently reiterated his intention to order the NYPD to arrest Netanyahu should he travel to New York.His October 7 statement on Tuesday attracted pushback from other pro-Israel voices. David Frum, a writer at the Atlantic and former speechwriter for George W Bush, wrote on X: “The chilly formulaic language about the 10/7 atrocity … the intense angry passion of the denunciation of Israel’s self-defense … together they arrestingly reveal what the author cares about and what/who he does not care about.”Fox News anchor David Asman called the statement “obscene”. He wrote on X: “The ‘very worst of mankind’ is what Mamdani supporters are on the streets today celebrating…‘honoring’ the beasts responsible for Oct 7. He supports a ‘global intifada,’ responsible for 9/11 and Oct 7. He should not be mayor of a city hit so hard by Jihadists.”Noa Yachot contributed reporting More

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      Venezuela on edge over Trump regime change whispers: ‘If it does happen we are ready’

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      The mayor of Caracas had come to one of her city’s busiest tube stations wearing a camouflage T-shirt declaring herself a card-carrying combatant – and with a message to match.“They think they’re the owners of the world,” Carmen Meléndez complained of the Trump administration and its pressure campaign against Venezuela’s government. “But if they dare [to invade] we’ll be waiting for them here.”Meléndez said she hoped a US invasion was not on the horizon, even though they had shown themselves to be “a bunch of crazies, who are capable of anything”. “But if it does happen we are ready,” she added, “and we will use all of the weapons we have to defend the homeland.”Mayor Meléndez was at La Rinconada station to supervise an early morning drill: a practice response to fictitious cyberattack on the Caracas underground that had brought its trains to a halt.The rehearse evacuation, ordered by President Nicolás Maduro as part of a nationwide “civil protection and preparation of the people” exercise, came as Donald Trump turned the heat up on Venezuela’s leader to levels rarely seen before.Since early August, when Trump signed a secret directive authorizing military action against Latin America drug cartels, the US president has labelled Maduro a “narco-terrorist” fugitive and advertised a $50m reward for his arrest; deployed marines and warships off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast; and ordered at least four deadly strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats which have killed at least 21.Last week Trump again upped the ante, declaring a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels whose members were now considered “unlawful combatants”.View image in fullscreenWashington has justified its strikes as part of a crackdown on Venezuelan narco-traffickers who the US accuses of flooding its streets with drugs, supposedly at Maduro’s behest. “They’re the enemies of all humanity,” Trump told the UN last month, vowing to blow such “terrorist thugs … out of existence”.But many observers suspect Trump’s counter-narcotics crusade is really a pretext to depose Maduro, either by sparking an internal rebellion against Hugo Chávez’s authoritarian heir or perhaps through direct military intervention within Venezuela itself.Speaking to the New York Times last month, Venezuela’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, said she was convinced one of Trump’s “strategic objectives” was “what they call ‘regime change’”. “We will never handover our homeland!” Rodríguez vowed as she announced that Maduro would declare a state of emergency in the event of a US attack.Rodríguez and Meléndez are not the only Maduro allies talking tough in the face of US pressure. One recent evening, the interior minister Diosdado Cabello, appeared on television clutching a heavily annotated copy of a book about the “military thinking” of the Vietnamese revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh. The message was clear: any attempt to topple Maduro’s regime would suck US troops into a bloody quagmire such as the one that unfolded in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and nearly 60,000 American soldiers.Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for Crisis Group, doubted Trump had immediate plans to target Fort Tiuna, the military base where Maduro is thought to live.But Gunson did think Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June had left Venezuela’s leaders genuinely alarmed. In a recent letter to Trump, Maduro tried to defuse the situation, writing: “I respectfully invite you, President, to promote peace through constructive dialogue and mutual understanding throughout the hemisphere.”View image in fullscreen“What Trump did to Iran was a wake up call to the people in government here,” said Gunson. “A lot of analysts thought that wasn’t going to happen … But they did it – and the Iranians had no response. And I think that that was quite sobering for the Chavistas.”The idea of a US intervention is music to the ears of some of Maduro’s political foes, who are desperate to end his 12-year rule during which Venezuela’s economy and democracy have crumbled and millions have fled abroad.In a recent interview, the prominent conservative politician María Corina Machado – whose ally, Edmundo González, is widely believed to have beaten Maduro in last year’s election – hailed Trump’s “visionary” stance. “I totally support his strategy … I’m in favour of the US dismantling this criminal structure,” Machado, who is in hiding in Venezuela, told the Sunday Times.The exiled opposition leader Leopoldo López has said their movement supports “any scenario that helps us transition to democracy”.Robert Evan Ellis, a Latin America specialist who advised the state department on Venezuela policy during Trump’s first administration, saw a “50-50” chance of the opposition’s wish coming true.Trump’s failure to unseat Maduro with a “maximum pressure” campaign during his first term, made it more likely the US president would try to finish the job now, Evan Ellis said. “I think there’s … a certain determination not to essentially feel that he loses this time around as well – so I think that creates incentive,” he said.After the Caribbean boat strikes, Evan Ellis anticipated a “graduated escalation” of US pressure – perhaps air strikes against “narco-planes” or “narco-leaders” on Venezuelan soil: “You don’t just unnecessarily jump from blowing up a couple of ships to pulling the trigger on a major air-land campaign.”View image in fullscreenBut Evan Ellis did not rule out a large-scale “multi-pronged attack”, involving F-35 fighter jets destroying Venezuela’s aerial defences before troops “grab[bed] Maduro wherever he is, based on probably good insider intelligence” and took him to the US. On Thursday, Venezuela’s defence minister, Vladimir Padrino López, said five US “combat aircraft” had been detected flying off his country’s coast.Four days later, on Monday, another key Maduro ally, the national assembly president, Jorge Rodríguez, announced that he had informed US and European authorities of plans for an alleged “false flag operation” attack on the US embassy in Caracas. Rodríguez claimed right-wing extremists had been plotting to target the building with “lethal explosives”.The prospect of a US intervention fills many Venezuelans – even those opposed to Maduro – with dread. “If there’s a war, what will we do?” said Naide González, 58, a cleaner from 23 de Enero, a working class community in Caracas long considered a stronghold of Chavismo.In a recent Guardian interview, Juan González, the White House’s top Latin America official under Joe Biden, called Trump’s military buildup “political theatre” designed to convince Maga voters that he was taking a hard line on drugs and migrants coming from South America. But González feared that if Maduro was deposed, the US could stumble into a protracted guerrilla war, involving a variety of armed groups including government-linked paramilitaries, criminal organizations and Colombian rebels from the National Liberation Army (ELN).“The conditions are ripe here for some kind of protracted low-intensity conflict, if the US gets it wrong – which they may well,” Gunson warned. “This country is absolutely packed from end to end with armed groups of various kinds, none of whom has any incentive to just surrender or stop doing what they’re doing.”David Smilde, a Tulane University Venezuela specialist, said neoconservative Trump officials and hard-line members of Venezuela’s opposition seemed convinced by the “absolutely absurd” idea that Maduro was “hanging on by threads” and that regime change could be achieved “with just a few limited strikes”.“This is the mentality that thought that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a house of cards and Iraq would be a cakewalk once you got rid of Saddam Hussein or took Baghdad,” Smilde added.At La Rinconada, government supporters vowed to resist any foreign intervention as commuters streamed out of the underground into a sunny Caracas morning.Amelia Contreras, a 68-year-old seamstress who is part of Maduro’s Bolivarian militia volunteer group, said she had been receiving first aid and firearms training in preparation for a possible attack. In the event of an incursion, Contreras had been tasked with defending Caracas’s electricity pylons. “We don’t want anyone coming along and interfering here – we won’t allow it,” she said.Kristian Laborín, a 48-year-old member of Maduro’s socialist party, had spent the last three Saturdays undergoing military training but still hoped the US would recoil. “President Trump, there’s still time for us to continue building friendly ties between our peoples,” Laborín said.But if the US president insisted on attacking, Laborín’s comrades would have no choice but to fight back. Parroting a government propaganda line, he said: “You’d be talking about a Hundred Years’ War!” More