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      A socialist underdog makes history in New York – podcast

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      Archive: CBS News, CBS New York, PBS Newshour, Eyewitness News ABC7NY, Fox 5 New York, MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, PIX11 News
      Here’s a link to Carter Sherman’s new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future
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      Briefing on Iran strikes leaves senators divided as Trump threatens new row

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      Republican and Democratic senators have offered starkly contrasting interpretations of Donald Trump’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities after a delayed behind-closed-doors intelligence briefing that the White House had earlier postponed amid accusations of leaks.Thursday’s session with senior national security officials came after the White House moved back its briefing, originally scheduled for Tuesday, fueling Democratic complaints that Trump was stonewalling Congress over military action the president authorized without congressional approval.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said following the initial postponement, which he termed “outrageous”.Even as senators were being briefed, Trump reignited the row with a Truth Social post accusing Democrats of leaking a draft Pentagon report that suggested last weekend’s strikes had only set back Iran’s nuclear program by months – contradicting the president’s insistence that it was “obliterated”.“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!” he wrote.The partisan divisions were on display after the briefing, which was staged in the absence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who previously told Congress that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, before changing her tune last week after Trump said she was “wrong”.Instead, the briefing was led by CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who had publicly assailed journalists over their reporting on the strikes at a Pentagon press conference.With intelligence agencies apparently in open dispute over the strikes’ effectiveness, Thursday’s briefing did little to clear up the clashing interpretations on Capitol Hill.Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and close Trump ally, said “obliteration” was a “good word” to describe the strikes’ impact.“They blew these places up in a major-league way. They set them back years, not months,” he said. “Nobody is going to work in these three sites any time soon. Their operational capability was obliterated.”But he warned that Iran would be likely to try to reconstitute them, adding: “Have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon? As long as they desire one, as long as they want to kill all the Jews, you still have a problem on your hands. I don’t want the American people to think this is over.”But Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Trump was “misleading the public” in claiming the program was obliterated and questioned why Gabbard had not attended the briefing.His skepticism was echoed by Schumer, who said the briefing gave “no adequate answer” to questions about Trump’s claims.“What was clear is that there was no coherent strategy, no endgame, no plan, no specific[s], no detailed plan on how Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he said, adding that Congress needed to assert its authority by enforcing the War Powers Act.Gabbard and Ratcliffe had scrambled on Wednesday to back Trump, with Gabbard posting on X: “New intelligence confirms what POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.”The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes, dismissed the destruction claims as meaningless. “The only question that matters is whether the Iranian regime has the stuff necessary to build a bomb, and if so, how fast,” he posted.The destruction response has also rankled Republican senators in the anti-interventionist wing of the party such as Rand Paul, who rejected claims of absolute presidential war powers.“I think the speaker needs to review the constitution,” said Paul. “And I think there’s a lot of evidence that our founding fathers did not want presidents to unilaterally go to war.”The Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution requiring congressional approval for future military action against Iran, though the measure appears unlikely to pass given Republican control of the chamber.The White House also admitted on Thursday to restricting intelligence sharing after news of the draft assessment leaking.Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the administration wants to ensure “classified intelligence is not ending up in irresponsible hands”. Leavitt later said the US assessed that there “was no indication” enriched uranium was moved from the nuclear sites in Iran ahead of the strikes.Trump formally notified Congress of the strikes in a brief letter sent on Monday, two days after the bombing, saying the action was taken “to advance vital United States national interests, and in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel, by eliminating Iran’s nuclear program”.The administration says it remains “on a diplomatic path with Iran” through special envoy Steve Witkoff’s communications with Iranian officials. More

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      Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson press chief and celebrated broadcaster, dies at 91

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      Bill Moyers, the former White House press secretary who became one of television’s most honored journalists, masterfully using a visual medium to illuminate a world of ideas, died on Thursday at age 91.Moyers died in a New York City hospital, according to longtime friend Tom Johnson, the former chief executive of CNN and an assistant to Moyers during Lyndon B Johnson’s administration.Moyers’ son William said his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York after a “long illness”.Moyers’ career ranged from youthful Baptist minister to deputy director of the Peace Corps, from Johnson’s press secretary to newspaper publisher, senior news analyst for CBS Evening News and chief correspondent for CBS Reports.But it was for public television that Moyers produced some of TV’s most cerebral and provocative series. In hundreds of hours of PBS programs, he proved at home with subjects ranging from government corruption to modern dance, from drug addiction to media consolidation, from religion to environmental abuse.In 1988, Moyers produced The Secret Government about the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, and simultaneously published a book under the same name. Around that time, he galvanized viewers with Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of six one-hour interviews with the prominent religious scholar. The accompanying book became a bestseller.His televised chats with poet Robert Bly almost single-handedly launched the 1990s Men’s Movement, and his 1993 series Healing and the Mind had a profound impact on the medical community and on medical education.In a medium that supposedly abhors “talking heads” – shots of subject and interviewer talking – Moyers came to specialize in just that. He once explained why: “The question is, are the talking heads thinking minds and thinking people? Are they interesting to watch? I think the most fascinating production value is the human face.”Demonstrating what someone called “a soft, probing style” in the native Texas accent he never lost, Moyers was a humanist who investigated the world with a calm, reasoned perspective, whatever the subject.From some quarters, he was blasted as a liberal thanks to his links with Johnson and public television, as well as his no-holds-barred approach to investigative journalism. It was a label he didn’t necessarily deny.“I’m an old-fashion liberal when it comes to being open and being interested in other people’s ideas,” he said during a 2004 radio interview. But Moyers preferred to term himself a “citizen journalist” operating independently, outside the establishment.Public television (and his self-financed production company) gave him free rein to throw “the conversation of democracy open to all comers”, he said in a 2007 interview with the Associated Press.“I think my peers in commercial television are talented and devoted journalists,” he said another time, “but they’ve chosen to work in a corporate mainstream that trims their talent to fit the corporate nature of American life. And you do not get rewarded for telling the hard truths about America in a profit-seeking environment.”Over the years, Moyers was showered with honors, including more than 30 Emmys, 11 George Foster Peabody awards, three George Polks and, twice, the Alfred I duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton award for career excellence in broadcast journalism. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, on 5 June 1934, Billy Don Moyers was the son of a dirt farmer-truck driver who soon moved his family to Marshall, Texas. High school led him into journalism.“I wanted to play football, but I was too small. But I found that by writing sports in the school newspaper, the players were always waiting around at the newsstand to see what I wrote,” he recalled.He worked for the Marshall News Messenger at age 16. Deciding that Bill Moyers was a more appropriate byline for a sportswriter, he dropped the Y from his name.He graduated from the University of Texas and earned a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained and preached part time at two churches but later decided his call to the ministry “was a wrong number”.His relationship with Johnson began when he was in college; he wrote to the then senator offering to work in his 1954 re-election campaign. Johnson was impressed and hired him for a summer job. He was back in Johnson’s employ as a personal assistant in the early 1960s and for two years, he worked at the Peace Corps, eventually becoming deputy director.On the day John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Moyers was in Austin helping with the presidential trip. He flew back to Washington on Air Force One with newly sworn-in President Johnson, for whom he held various jobs over the ensuing years, including press secretary.Moyers’ stint as presidential press secretary was marked by efforts to mend the deteriorating relationship between Johnson and the media. But the Vietnam war took its toll and Moyers resigned in December 1966.Of his departure from the White House, he wrote later: “We had become a war government, not a reform government, and there was no creative role left for me under those circumstances.” More

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      The Donald laps it up as Nato leaders compete to shower him with sycophancy | John Crace

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      Sometimes it pays to be a narcissist. To bend reality to your own worldview. To live almost entirely in the present. Where contradicting yourself is not a problem because two opposing statements can both be true. On the way to Nato you can question article 5. On the way back you can give all the other Nato leaders a patronising pat on the head. And everyone is grateful for it.There again it also helps if you are the most powerful man in the world. Donald Trump is not just tolerated, he is actively indulged. Prime ministers from other countries go out of their way to compete with one another in outright sycophancy. Flattery that started off as contrived now sounds dangerously sincere. Almost as if they genuinely believe it. Thank you Agent Orange for all you have done. We don’t know where we would be without you.And The Donald just laps it up. Feeds on it. At the recent Nato summit he looked like a pig in shit. Living his best life. Whatever sunbed regime he’s on, it’s working for him. If he lost any sleep over his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, it doesn’t show. Just repeat after Donald: The mission was a complete and utter success and Iran’s programme has been put back decades. If the Pentagon says otherwise, it’s just fake news. Yet again, reality can be what you want it to be.Even when Trump temporarily loses it, he wins. Swearing is generally a no-no for any leader. A sign that you’ve lost control. But when Donald said Israel and Iran didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, he came out of it smelling of roses. Praised for his authenticity. Applauded for saying what the rest of the world is thinking. The Donald can do no wrong. He looks relaxed. God stand up for narcissists.Keir Starmer is no narcissist. And breathe a sigh of relief for that. The UK tried the narcissist route with Boris Johnson and that didn’t end well. Maybe we just aren’t a powerful enough country to get away with a sociopath in charge. Or, heaven forbid, maybe it was a matter of timing. Boris was the right man at the wrong time. That’s a horrible thought. Most of us would quite happily settle for a period of fairly boring politics. Where the government is serving the country rather than the ego of the person in charge. Where even when they are getting things wrong, they are at least trying to do the right thing.But that level of decency comes with a cost. Your psyche does not reward itself with a free pass. You worry about the consequences of your actions. Your toadying to The Donald. You worry about the people dying in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Iran. You worry when your domestic policies look like they are falling apart. Wish you had spent more time reassuring backbenchers. Had explained better the trade-offs you were making. Had not been so quick to take a quick cash-saving win by removing benefits from people who can’t wash themselves before going to work.Keir has tried to keep a lid on all this as leaders always do. Pretend that he’s fully in charge of the situation. That everything is going according to plan. But always the tell-tale signs leak out. Starmer’s eyes betray him. They have a deadness to them, the life squeezed out. His face pasty and pallid. A man desperate for a breather, a moment to relax away from the treadmill.Yet always there is one thing more. Another summit, another speech, another bilat, another crisis at home. This wasn’t how he imagined his first year in Downing Street. The pressure and the pace is relentless. The treadmill going ever faster and there’s no getting off. He aches in the places where he used to play.Just hours after returning from The Hague, Keir was giving a keynote speech to the British Chambers of Commerce. It was one that he and they will quickly forget. A routine, box-ticking affair. An annual date, along with the CBI, in any prime minister’s diary. It wasn’t meant to be this way, mind. Starmer knows better than anyone that Labour has to work twice as hard to show that it is the party of business. But this time he couldn’t fake it to make it. He’s no visionary. He can’t access people’s hearts. Only their reason. And that only intermittently.Keir began by thanking the BCC for all it had done for the country. He knew it had been a tough year and he had asked a lot of business, but the good times were round the corner. Possibly. There was the new infrastructure strategy. Now there was also a new trade strategy which sounded very much like the old one. Which was to keep on doing the trade deals we can, as with the partial deals with the EU, US and India, and try to do some new smaller deals with other nations. The applause from the audience was barely audible. They didn’t sound desperately impressed. They can tell when a speaker is out on his feet and is phoning it in.Just over an hour later and Starmer was in the Commons for a statement on the G7 and Nato summits. Here he was much more like his chipper self. Not so much in his opening remarks about how the west was making a dangerous world safer, but in his reply to Kemi Badenoch.The Tory leader just gets worse and worse. Half-witted, sulky and tone deaf. Kemikaze seemed to think the UK should no longer bother to send its prime minister to these international meetings. That Keir had only gone for the craic and to avoid her at prime minister’s questions. As if. Facing Kemi over the dispatch box was his half an hour of R&R in the week.Starmer dismissed her with barely concealed contempt as neither serious nor credible. An am-dram politician. Even the Tories were aghast. Mark Pritchard openly criticised his leader. He spoke for many on his own benches.Kemi had achieved the seemingly impossible. She had revivified a tired prime minister and united both Labour and opposition MPs against her. There is only one politician who looks a genuine leader in the Commons and it is still Starmer. He may have his hands full with a rebellion over the welfare bill, but as long as Kemi remains the leader of the opposition, he has nothing to fear from the Tories. More

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      Senators to meet security officials amid questions over Trump’s decision to attack Iran – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.In other news:

      Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.

      Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.

      Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.

      Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.

      Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.

      The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time. More

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      Trump slams Zohran Mamdani as Republicans go on attack after New York mayoral primary – live

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      Donald Trump has weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying: “the Democrats have crossed the line”. He called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic”.“He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart, he’s got AOC+3, Dummies ALL, backing him, and even our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, is groveling over him,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!”In a second post, he said, presumably in jest, that Democrats should nominate “Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President” to get back in play, and put “AOC+3” – his term for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Squad members – in Cabinet positions.
      Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and our Country is really SCREWED!”
      The Harvard University researcher and Russia-born scientist who spent months in Ice custody after being accused of smuggling frog embryos into the US now faces additional criminal charges.A federal grand jury indicted Kseniia Petrova, a cancer researcher for Harvard Medical School, on Wednesday on one count of concealment of a material fact, one count of false statement and one count of smuggling goods into the United States, the Associated Press reports.She was returning from a vacation earlier this year in France, where she had stopped at a lab specializing in splicing superfine sections of frog embryos to obtain a package of samples for research. She was questioned about the samples while passing through a US Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at Boston Logan international airport, and told after an interrogation that her visa was being canceled.Federal officials accused her of lying about “carrying substances” into the country and alleged that she planned to smuggle the embryos through customs without declaring them. Petrova has said she didn’t realize the items needed to be declared.Petrova faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 if convicted of smuggling and a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on the charges of concealment of material fact and false statements.Let’s round up what’s been happening since this morning:

      Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.

      Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.

      Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.

      Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.

      Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.

      The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time.

      A Senate subcommittee held a hearing this afternoon called “Enter the Dragon – China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance,” attempting to tie lawsuits from local governments against big oil over climate issues to China.

      Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported to El Salvador by mistake and then returned to the US, will be released from a Tennessee jail today, then taken into immigration custody.

      US congresswoman LaMonica McIver pleaded not guilty to federal charges of assaulting, resisting and impeding immigration officers in New Jersey while on a congressional oversight visit to a detention facility.

      Dozens of cities and states have in recent years sued big oil over its climate-warming pollution and history of allegedly spreading climate disinformation. Those lawsuits are advancing the agenda of the Chinese communist party, Republicans argued in a hearing on Wednesday.Titled “Enter the Dragon – China and the Left’s Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance”, the hearing in the Senate judiciary oversight subcommittee aimed to show that climate advocates want to weaken the US energy sector, giving China the upper hand.It came as Washington DC temperatures neared 100 degrees, and as Republicans are working to gut clean energy credits in reconciliation bill negotiations.“The agenda of the Chinese Communist Party and the agenda of Senate Democrats are identical: Both China and the Democrats want to bankrupt the American energy industry,” said committee chair Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas. He went on to claim that “left wing groups funded by Communist China”.Among the expert witnesses invited by Republicans was Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach, chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has been backed by oil and gas interests. In his testimony, he called on Congress to amend the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.This month, Kobach was among 16 Republican attorneys general who signed a letter to the Justice Department calling on the Trump administration to quash climate lawsuits and provide fossil fuel companies with immunity from current and future litigation.David Arkush, a director at climate and consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, who was invited to testify by Democratic senators, pushed back on the premise of the hearing.“Right now, there’s a brutal heatwave afflicting half the United States, energy costs and insurance premiums are skyrocketing, and we’re sitting here in the US Senate talking about Chinese communist conspiracy theories,” he said. “I don’t think this is the right priority.”CNN has responded to Trump’s outburst about its reporter, Natasha Bertrand, defending her journalism. The media company noted that Bertrand and other journalists who reported on the intelligence assessment specifically noted that this was an initial finding, and the network has also covered Trump’s skepticism of the intelligence report.“However, we do not believe it is reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest,” CNN said in a statement.Donald Trump has weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying: “the Democrats have crossed the line”. He called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic”.“He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart, he’s got AOC+3, Dummies ALL, backing him, and even our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, is groveling over him,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!”In a second post, he said, presumably in jest, that Democrats should nominate “Low IQ Candidate, Jasmine Crockett, for President” to get back in play, and put “AOC+3” – his term for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Squad members – in Cabinet positions.
      Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and our Country is really SCREWED!”
      Donald Trump wants CNN to fire its journalist who has been reporting on the intelligence that casts doubt on whether the US bombs sent to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites actually obliterated them, as Trump has claimed.Natasha Bertrand has reported in the last few days about intelligence assessments that show the “bunker buster” bombs may not have destroyed key parts of Iran’s nuclear program and could have only set the country back months in creating nuclear weapons.During Trump’s press conference at the Nato summit, he and defense secretary Pete Hegseth lashed out at reporters who questioned whether the US had destroyed the sites and claimed they weren’t respecting the military members who conducted the strikes. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, he railed against CNN and the New York Times for reporting on the intelligence concerns, saying they “tried to demean” the pilots.Now, he’s making the criticism more pointed, singling out Bertrand in a post this afternoon:
      Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out “like a dog.” She lied on the Laptop from Hell Story, and now she lied on the Nuclear Sites Story, attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit “pay dirt” — TOTAL OBLITERATION! She should not be allowed to work at Fake News CNN. It’s people like her who destroyed the reputation of a once great Network. Her slant was so obviously negative, besides, she doesn’t have what it takes to be an on camera correspondent, not even close. FIRE NATASHA!
      Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut who has emerged as a leading voice on the left, congratulated Zohran Mamdani on his win, saying it offered “important lessons” for Democrats.“Focus on shifting economic power. Relentlessly. Have big ideas on how to do it,” Murphy wrote on X. “Be joyful and authentic. Even if your ideas aren’t considered ‘mainstream’ by elites. The elites have little idea what’s actually mainstream.”His comments are an echo of what he told the Guardian two weeks ago for where the Democratic party should move after the harsh 2024 loss. He told David Smith that the party claims to be the party of poor people, but poor people don’t vote for Democrats any more.
      There’s a lot of conservative poor people out there who think that our party is way too judgmental. We’ve got to become a bigger tent party when it comes to a lot of social and cultural and hot button issues and then we’ve got to become an aggressively populist party.
      A mediator between Donald Trump and Paramount, which owns CBS News, has suggested the media company settle a lawsuit from the president for $20m, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.Trump’s lawsuit came after a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which Trump alleged was election interference because of how the interview was edited. CBS has defended its work, saying it edited a response to make it more succinct, a common practice for journalists.The suit is one of several Trump has filed against media companies, a way to intimidate the press and draw their resources into settlements or lengthy court battles. Paramount is also in the middle of a merger, which plays into its willingness to get on the Trump administration’s good side. The lawsuit has roiled CBS, with high-profile departures from its news operations who see a settlement as damaging to journalism.Trump wanted $20bn in damages; Paramount had previously offered $15m to settle, but Trump wanted upward of $25m, according to the Journal. The mediator’s $20m proposal would include $17m for Trump’s foundation or museum, plus money for legal fees and public-service announcements against antisemitism, the Journal says. But, it notes, “Settlement talks are still fluid and an agreement may not be reached.”A few updates on some immigration issues we’ve been covering:

      Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador by mistake and then returned to the US, is expected to be released from a Tennessee jail today. He will then be taken into immigration custody, the Associated Press reports. He was charged by the US with two counts of human smuggling.

      Separately, the US representative who was charged after a congressional visit to an immigration detention center pleaded not guilty today, according to the AP. US congresswoman LaMonica McIver faces federal charges of assaulting, resisting and impeding immigration officers in New Jersey. Outside the courthouse, she said: “They will not intimidate me. They will not stop me from doing my job.”

      And in Maryland, the Trump administration has taken the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against federal judges over an order they made that blocks removals for detained immigrants who request a court hearing.

      Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, is expected to make a “major announcement” and “formally announce” presumably a run to keep his office midday tomorrow.Adams’s campaign said in a press release today that Adams “will make a major announcement about the future of his re-election campaign” on the steps of New York city hall at noon Thursday.“With the Democratic primary now behind him, this pivotal moment will set the stage for the next phase of the 2025 mayoral race,” the release says.Adams ran for mayor as a Democrat but has said he would run as an independent in the general election.Democratic senators have repeatedly pressed Emil Bove about his involvement in the decision to drop corruption charges filed under Joe Biden’s administration against Eric Adams, alleging the decision was a quid pro quo to win the New York mayor’s cooperation on immigration enforcement.“In order to get Mayor Adams to cooperate with President Trump’s immigration policy, you were prepared to drop the charges against him?” asked Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary committee’s top Democrat.“That’s completely false,” Bove replied.Durbin went on to allege that a federal judge “foiled your plans” by dismissing the charges with prejudice – meaning they could not be refiled, and Adams would have no incentive to cooperate. “You could no longer have the mayor on a leash making sure that he follows the president’s immigration policies,” the senator said.“There’s objective evidence in the record in that case that completely refutes the claim you just made,” Bove replied. Durbin went on to ask whether the justice department attorneys who signed the brief dropping the charges were either threatened or rewarded, which Bove said did not happen.Republican senators have thus far signaled no opposition to confirming Bove to a seat on the third circuit court of appeals, which covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the US Virgin Islands. In their questioning, they gave Bove the opportunity to strenuously deny Democrats’ allegations.“I want you to look me in the eye and swear to your higher being when you answer this question, did you make a deal, a political deal, to dismiss the charges against Mayor Adams?” asked senator John Kennedy.“Absolutely not,” Bove replied. More

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      Usha Vance: husband’s pick as Trump running mate came ‘like a bolt of lightning’

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      Usha Vance learned her husband, JD, had been selected to be Donald Trump’s running mate “maybe five minutes” before the news was made public – and just about an hour before he was formally nominated.“It really was like a bolt of lightning,” Vance said during an interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast, Citizen McCain. Nearly a year later, seated in the vice-president’s residence on the grounds of the US naval observatory, Vance reflected on how significantly her life has changed in ways big and small. “People call you ma’am,” she said. “No one’s ever called me ma’am before this.”Until last summer, Vance, the daughter of immigrants and a one-time Democrat, worked as a lawyer at a progressive law firm, raising her three young children in Ohio. Now, as second lady, she is escorted by Secret Service and can’t leave a gym class without being recognized in Washington.During the nearly hour-long interview, Vance was not asked to weigh in on the political or policy agenda of the Trump administration – the president’s decision to strike Iran, the immigration raids that have roiled her native California or the crackdown on colleges and law firms.Instead, Vance spoke about how the second couple is working to create a sense of normalcy for their three young children, and how she hopes to use her role to “make things just a little bit better for other people”. She talked about missing Ohio, trying to keep her kids off screens, her husband’s love for baking, and losing “that sense of being anonymous in public”.Asked about being a first – Vance is the nation’s first south Asian and Hindu second lady – she said it has “not been something that people are hyper-focused on”.“Maybe we’ve just sort of moved beyond trying to count firsts of everything,” she said, while also noting that many people have told her “how proud they are and how excited they are for this”.“That does give me a little bit of a sense of purpose,” she said.At the end of the interview, McCain, a former host of The View and daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, raised what she called the “elephant in the room” and asked whether Vance had considered the prospect “that you could be our first lady in a few years”.“I’m not plotting out next steps or really trying for anything after this,” Vance said. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things. And if that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand. [I’m] just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can.”Vance so far refrained from choosing a single social cause or project to champion, as her predecessors have done, worried that the response would be to “attribute some kind of political motive or start to polarize around it”. Still, she offered a glimpse of the issues that she may want to focus on in her role. Her office is hosting the “Second Lady’s 2025 Summer Reading Challenge”, which she described as “the first of many small attempts” to encourage reading and help draw “children into the world of things and not of devices”.At one point in the conversation, McCain revealed that she was expecting a third child – a boy – and asked Vance to “share with me and women in America why having three kids is good”. Vance congratulated McCain warmly, and described how her children operated as a “pack”, playing together and taking care of each other. She assured McCain that the transition from two to three children was “shockingly, the easiest of all”. More

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      Union leaders’ exit from DNC exposes ‘mind-boggling’ tensions inside Democratic party

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      As the Democratic party fights to rebuild from a devastating election defeat, the abrupt exit of the presidents of two of the nation’s largest labor unions from its top leadership board has exposed simmering tensions over the party’s direction.Randi Weingarten and Lee Saunders quit the Democratic National Committee, saying it isn’t doing enough to “open the gates” and win back the support of working-class voters. Ken Martin, the new DNC chair, and his allies told the Guardian that the party was focused on doing exactly that.Weingarten, president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, resigned after Martin did not renominate her to serve on the DNC’s important rules committee. In her resignation letter, Weingarten wrote that education, healthcare and public service workers were in “an existential battle” due to Donald Trump’s attacks and that she did not “want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent”.Saunders, the long-time president of the 1.3-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also issued a critical statement. “These are new times. They deserve new strategies,” he said. “We must evolve to meet the urgency of the moment. This is not a time to close ranks or turn inward … It is our responsibility to open the gates [and] welcome others.”View image in fullscreenSeveral DNC officials asserted that the two departures were a “tempest in a teapot”, insisting that Martin is working to have the DNC welcome more people and battle against Trump. Weingarten and Saunders evidently felt sore that their candidate for DNC chair, Ben Wikler, the head of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, lost to Martin, the officials suggested.Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, said the resignations were an inarguable blow to the DNC.“When something like this becomes public, there’s clearly a spotlight on it,” he said. “Giving the longstanding leadership role that Randi and Lee have played in the Democratic party, and at a time when the party is trying to desperately improve its image with working-class voters and remake itself in a lot of ways, this is really unacceptable.”In an interview, Weingarten said she wished the DNC was conducting an all-out nationwide mobilization to defeat the Trump/GOP budget bill, which would throw an estimated 11 million Americans off health insurance, cut food stamps to millions of families and cause the federal debt to soar by over $3tn.DNC chair Martin told the Guardian that, under his leadership, the DNC was already doing what Weingarten and Saunders were calling for. “I’ve always called myself a pro-labor progressive,” Martin said, noting that he had been a union member and labor organizer. “My family grew up on programs that would be cut if Trump’s tax scam passes. Winning back the working class and stopping Trump from harming families is exactly where our focus is.”Martin added that in his nearly five months as DNC chair, the committee has held 130 town halls and launched an “aggressive war room” to take on Trump. “My first action as DNC chair was pledging to have strong labor voices at the table,” Martin said. “Our job is to win in 2025, 2026 and beyond.”But their resignation statements signal that Weingarten and Saunders have a very different view from Martin of what the DNC is doing on his watch. Several DNC officials said the pair might not be up to date with the DNC’s activities across the 50 states.Weingarten told the Guardian that Martin and the DNC are not showing nearly enough urgency in opposing the Trump/GOP budget bill. “The number one issue in the next two weeks is: how do we help fight the GOP budget bill that faces almost two-to-one public opposition,” she said, adding that the DNC should be going all out to help House and Senate Democrats torpedo the bill.“We can be the voice and be out there with stories about how the budget bill will hurt, and the DNC is a perfect place for doing that,” Weingarten said. “You got to win hearts and minds now, not in October 2026. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve been looking for since January. We have to be a party that wins on the ground.”Artie Blanco, a union activist and DNC vice-chair, said that under Martin, the DNC had been fighting hard against the budget bill.“There are over 16,000 Democratic volunteers making phone calls across the country in targeted congressional districts about the GOP budget, and how it will be devastating to working people,” Blanco said.Weingarten voiced dismay about not being renominated for the rules committee. “It was definitely a sign that my input was not sought any more and [not] appreciated,” she said, stressing that the AFT “will continue to be a leader in electing pro-public education, pro-working family candidates” and planned to be “especially engaged” in the 2025-26 elections.Jane Kleeb, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said that Weingarten’s and Saunders’s “claims that Ken and the DNC are not standing up for working people and not standing on the side of unions and union members is laughable”.“Ken has been on the front line to bring unions back to our party,” added Kleeb, who is also chair of the Nebraska Democratic party. “He has appointed more union leaders than any other [DNC] chair” – and put unions at the forefront while chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, before he assumed the DNC’s helm, she said.Stuart Appelbaum, the DNC’s labor chair, and president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, took issue with the statements Weingarten and Saunders made about Martin.“I am thrilled that Ken Martin is prioritizing the importance of having labor at the table and has ensured that there is strong labor representation in every part of the DNC,” Appelbaum said. He added that Martin “understands that working people are the backbone of the party”.Michael Podhorzer, a political strategist and former AFL-CIO political director, said the Democratic party has for decades not focused enough on working-class voters. He said Democrats would have a tough battle winning back blue-collar voters. “The experience of many American working people is they feel left off the radar,” Podhorzer said.Democrats, Podhorzer noted, have suffered the greatest loss of support in communities that were “gutted” after the 2008-09 recession; from the signing of Nafta, a trade deal with Canada and Mexico; and from normalized trade relations with China. Nafta and normalized trade with China were ratified under President Clinton, a Democrat.Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist who has studied Trump’s success in wooing working-class voters, said the decline of US labor unions over the past 50 years has necessarily meant that unions have less sway in the Democratic party.Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO official and also a former DNC deputy political director, called on the DNC and Democrats to work far more closely with unions.“Among working-class voters, support for unions is through the roof, and the Democratic party and the Republican party have no credibility with working-class voters,” he said. “They don’t trust the parties, but they trust the labor movement. It’s incumbent on the party to build bridges and put the labor movement front and center in everything it does.”“From that standpoint,” he continued, the tension that led to Weingarten and Sauders quitting “is mind-boggling”. Several labor leaders said Martin should have done more to keep prominent and powerful union leaders like Weingarten and Saunders satisfied and on the DNC, even if they backed one of his opponents for DNC chair.Responding to Weingarten and Saunders’ concerns, Martin said: “The DNC and our partners are leading the fight against Trump’s budget bill, investing unprecedented dollars into states so Democrats can win elections from the ground up, and reaching out to voters in working-class districts.”Martin told the Guardian that he’s trying hard to build bridges with the broader labor movement, and increase its role in the DNC and in the Democrats’ efforts. “Winning back the working class and stopping Trump’s budget bill isn’t a political goal, it’s personal,” he said. “Labor runs through my family’s veins.” More