Category Archives: US Politics

Trump’s environmental rollbacks in focus on visit to Ohio toxic train site

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Former president criticizes Biden administration’s response to train derailment in East Palestine as he visits town

Donald Trump’s record of rolling back environmental protections was highlighted by critics on Wednesday as the ex-president visited the town of East Palestine, Ohio, and called the federal response to the toxic train derailment there earlier this month a “betrayal” .

Trump’s administration, which rolled back more than 100 environmental rules in total, watered down several regulations at the behest of the rail industry.

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Trump’s Ohio train derailment visit prompts questions on his environmental record – live

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Former president heading to East Palestine, Ohio, after loosening safety regulations for rail operators

Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg will visit East Palestine, Ohio on Thursday, Politico reports.

He’ll receive an update from the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the freight derailment that spilled toxic chemicals in the community, according to the report, which cites a person familiar with his plans.

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Biden’s proposal denying asylum at border would cause ‘unnecessary suffering’, say critics

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Proposal prompted comparisons to Trump’s policies to limit asylum for migrants, which Biden had pledged to reverse

Democrats and immigration advocates harshly criticized Joe Biden over a new proposal that could stop migrants claiming asylum when they arrive at the US-Mexico border. One advocate said the move would cause “unnecessary human suffering”.

The pushback came after the Biden administration unveiled a proposal that would deny asylum to migrants who arrive without first seeking it in one of the countries they passed through.

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Alarms raised as McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson access to January 6 footage

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Democrats condemn House speaker’s move and warn Capitol security could be endangered if Fox News host airs footage

Thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol are being made available to the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, that Democrats condemned as a “grave” breach of security.

The hard-right host said his team was spending the week at the Capitol, preparing to reveal their findings.

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Biden pledges more Moscow sanctions: ‘Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia’ – as it happened

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Speaking before a crowd of thousands in the gardens of Warsaw’s Royal Castle, Joe Biden hailed the resilience of Ukraine’s people and the benevolence of Poland and other western allies in helping fend off the Russian invasion.

“Autocrats only understand one word: no.” Biden said. “No, you will not take my country. No, you will not take my freedom. No, you will not take my future. I’ll repeat tonight what I said last year at the same place. A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberties. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, never.”

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Joe Biden’s train ride to Kyiv may not put him on track for a second term

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Visit to Ukraine is a defining moment for the US president but foreign policy does not necessarily win elections

John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had their speeches in Berlin. Joe Biden now has Kyiv, a moment to define his presidency and its era.

There was no one phrase in Biden’s remarks in Kyiv to match Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” in 1963 or Reagan’s “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall” in 1987, but the trip itself was the statement. As the White House underlined repeatedly on Monday, there was no precedent in modern times. Visits to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were different, as the US military ran security in those countries.

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Ohio senator blasts train operator and lobbyists over toxic derailment

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Democrat Sherrod Brown says derailment, which released toxic chemicals, was caused by Norfolk Southern

The Ohio senator Sherrod Brown had harsh criticism on Sunday for corporate lobbyists and Norfolk Southern, the Atlanta-based operator of the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, two weeks ago while carrying toxic chemicals.

Speaking on Sunday to CNN’s State of the Union, the Democrat said the derailment, which released toxic chemicals including the carcinogenic vinyl chloride, was an episode of “the same old story”, and that Norfolk Southern “caused it”.

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Larry Hogan: splitting anti-Trump vote ‘pretty good reason’ not to run in 2024

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Ex-Maryland governor tells Meet the Press: ‘I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party’

The danger of splitting anti-Trump Republicans and helping the former president win the nomination again “would be a pretty good reason to consider not running” for the White House in 2024, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan said.

“I don’t care that much about my future in the Republican party,” Hogan told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party.

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Revealed: the US adviser who tried to swing Nigeria’s 2015 election

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Sam Patten, an American consultant later mired in controversy, exploited emails obtained by Tal Hanan’s team

In late December 2014, a team from Cambridge Analytica flew to Madrid for meetings with a handful of old and new contacts. A member of the former Libyan royal family referred to as “His Royal Highness” was there. So, too, was the son of a US billionaire, a Nigerian businessman and a private Israeli intelligence operative.

For Alexander Nix, the Etonian chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and his new employee Brittany Kaiser, who networked like most other people breathed, there may have been nothing unusual about such a gathering.

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Oregon, a hotbed of extremism, seeks to curb paramilitaries

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As incidents increase, state lawmakers seek to allow civil suits against paramilitaries – but critics say rights will be infringed on

An armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge. Over 100 straight days of racial justice protests that turned downtown Portland into a battleground. A violent breach of the state capitol. Clashes between gun-toting rightwingers and leftist militants.

Over the past decade, Oregon experienced the sixth-highest number of extremist incidents in the nation, despite being 27th in population, according to an Oregon secretary of state report. Now, the state legislature is considering a bill that, experts say, would create the nation’s most comprehensive law against paramilitary activity.

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US officials say all debris from suspected Chinese spy balloon has been collected – as it happened

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American authorities have retrieved all the wreckage of the Chinese spy balloon a US fighter jet shot down off South Carolina’s coast, the Associated Press reports, which sparked a diplomatic incident with Beijing and kicked off a unusual spate of military action against unidentified objects in North American skies.

According to the AP, “Officials said the US believes that Navy, Coast Guard and FBI personnel collected all of the balloon debris off the ocean floor. US Northern Command said in a statement that the recovery operations ended Thursday and that final pieces are on their way to the FBI lab in Virginia for analysis. It said air and maritime restrictions off South Carolina have been lifted.”

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Republicans take aim at risque jokes and romance novels with anti-sex bills

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Bills are part of religious right’s post-Roe strategy, with most prevalent ones relating to age verification of sex-related websites

A wave of proposed legislation pushed by Republicans across the US at the state level is aimed at outlawing aspects of sexuality that could have a huge impact on Americans’ private lives and businesses.

Opponents to the laws before legislatures in various states say the planned new legislation could spawn prosecution of breast-pump companies in Texas for nipples on advertising, or a bookstore might be banned from selling romance novels in West Virginia, or South Carolina could imprison standup comics if a risque joke is heard by a young person.

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How big a threat does the hard right pose to US support for Ukraine?

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A year after the conflict began, the consensus against Russian aggression has held but alarm bells are ringing in Congress

Vladimir Putin has proven adept at exploiting the US political divide, so the solid bipartisan consensus behind arming Ukraine over the past year may well have come as a surprise to him. The question one year into the war is: how long can that consensus last?

Two weeks before the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion on 24 February, a group of Trump-supporting Republicans led by Matt Gaetz introduced a “Ukraine fatigue” resolution that, if passed, would “express through the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States must end its military and financial aid to Ukraine, and urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement”.

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Joe Biden declared healthy and ‘fit for duty’ after exam at Walter Reed hospital

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President lost weight since last year, but still suffers from arthritis and had small lesion removed from chest during annual check-up

Doctors declared Joe Biden, 80, healthy and “fit for duty” on Thursday after a physical examination that included removing a lesion from his chest and declaring him free of symptoms of long Covid after his bout last year with the virus.

“The president remains fit for duty, and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations,” White House physician Kevin O’Connor said in a summary of the health exam.

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Biden says latest objects shot down over US not linked to China spy program

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‘Private companies’ conclusion set to fuel criticism that downings were overreaction amid pressure over initial balloon discovery

Joe Biden has broken his silence on unknown aerial objects shot down over North America during the past week, assessing that they were “most likely” operated by private companies or research institutions rather than China.

The US president’s tentative conclusion is likely to fuel criticism that his orders to take down the objects were an overreaction amid political pressure over the discovery of a suspected Chinese spy balloon that transited much of the country.

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Biden says three objects shot down over US ‘most likely’ private, and not more Chinese spy balloons – as it happened

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The special grand jury empaneled in the Georgia’s Fulton county worried that at least one of the 75 witnesses it heard from may have lied under oath, according to portions of their report released today.

They also determined “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election,” the jurors wrote in the report’s introduction, which was released along with its conclusion and a brief chapter outlining the perjury concerns.

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Findings in Georgia Trump report could be enough to bring criminal charges

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The partial release of the grand jury report signals the investigation already contains legitimate evidence of perjury

The release of a portion of the Fulton county special purpose grand jury’s report marks a new step toward potential criminal charges holding Donald Trump and his allies accountable for election interference.

Georgia was crucial in the 2020 presidential election, providing a key victory for Joe Biden and drawing the intense focus of Trump and his backers.

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FBI searched University of Delaware in Biden documents investigation

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The justice department is looking into how classified documents came to be found in Joe Biden’s home and former office

The FBI searched the University of Delaware in recent weeks for classified documents as part of its investigation into the potential mishandling of sensitive government records by Joe Biden.

The search, first reported by CNN, was confirmed to the Associated Press by a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The person would not say whether anything was found.

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Pompeo says Israel has biblical claim to Palestine and is ‘not an occupying nation’

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Trump’s secretary of state makes comments on podcast to defend former administration siding more openly with Israel

Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, has defended Israel’s decades-long control of the Palestinian territories by claiming that the Jewish state has a biblical claim to the land and is therefore not occupying it.

Pompeo told the One Decision podcast that his religious beliefs, US strategic interests and his view of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as a “known terrorist” underpinned his support as the Trump administration’s top diplomat for the shift in US policy away from mediating a two-state solution and toward more openly siding with Israel.

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US could default this summer unless $31.4tn debt ceiling is raised, CBO warns

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Historic federal debt default could occur before July, cautions non-partisan agency

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday said the US treasury department will exhaust its ability to pay all its bills sometime between July and September, unless the current $31.4tn cap on borrowing is raised or suspended.

In a report issued alongside its annual budget outlook, the non-partisan CBO cautioned that a historic federal debt default could occur before July if revenue flowing into the treasury in April – when most Americans typically submit annual income tax filings – lags expectations.

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