Category Archives: US Politics

Supreme court paves way for South Carolina and other states to defund Planned Parenthood

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Decision could embolden red states in US to block clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid funds

The US supreme court has paved the way for South Carolina to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program over its status as an abortion provider, a decision that could embolden red states across the country to effectively “defund” the reproductive healthcare organization.

The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, centers around a 2018 executive order from South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, that blocked clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. “Payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster said at the time, even though the reimbursements could not be used for abortions. Abortions are also now banned in South Carolina after six weeks of pregnancy.

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Ro Khanna calls on Democrats to reclaim identity as ‘the anti-war party’

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‘We should be the party of peace abroad, good jobs at home. Donald Trump took that from us,’ says congressman

In the days since Donald Trump authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, and then forged a shaky ceasefire agreement, Congressman Ro Khanna has called on Democrats to reclaim a political identity he says they lost: being the party of peace.

“Now is the time for the Democratic party to be the anti-war party – the party against wars of choice,” Khanna said in an interview. “We should be the party of peace abroad, good jobs at home. Donald Trump took that from us in 2016 and 2024 and my leadership this past week has been trying to reclaim the anti-war mantle.”

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Mamdani says leftwing populist victory can be replicated across US

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Democratic socialist tells MSNBC his campaign against Cuomo shows leftist politics can thrive beyond New York

Zohran Mamdani, in his first major interview since his upset victory in the Democratic party’s mayoral primary in New York shook up US politics, said his brand of campaigning and leftist political stances can translate to anywhere in the US.

Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, stunned many observers by beating Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday night, delivering a devastating blow to the former New York governor who ran a centrist campaign backed by most of the party establishment.

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

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Second lady says on Meghan McCain podcast she is ‘not plotting next steps’ and is just ‘along for the ride’

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 Naval Observatory, Vance reflected on how radically her life has changed – “people call you ma’am. No one’s ever called me ma’am before this.”

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Trump DoJ ally denies claim he urged defying court orders on immigration

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Emil Bove, a former Trump attorney, faced Senate judiciary committee considering him to be federal appeals judge

Emil Bove, a top justice department official and former defense attorney for Donald Trump, denied to senators on Wednesday a whistleblower’s claim that he suggested prosecutors ignore orders from judges who ruled against the president’s immigration policy.

In a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee to consider his nomination to serve as a federal appeals court judge, Bove, currently the principal associate deputy attorney general at the justice department, also rejected assertions from Democrats that corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams were dropped in order to secure his cooperation with the president’s immigration enforcement agenda.

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Mamdani’s defeat of Cuomo offers Democrats a path out of the wilderness

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Mamdani signifies a generational change and rebuke to a party establishment grown complacent and hypocritical

The party was on its knees. It failed to beat Donald Trump, a twice impeached convicted felon, and lost both chambers of Congress. Since November, Democrats have been searching for a path out of the wilderness. On Tuesday, they found one.

But instead of celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the New York mayoral primary election, the first major Democratic contest since Trump’s win, many in the party establishment went into panic mode.

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Doge employee ‘Big Balls’ has resigned, says White House official

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One of Doge’s best-known workers Edward Coristine, 19, quits a month after his former boss Elon Musk’s departure

One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former boss Elon Musk.

The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

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Judge blocks Trump from withholding EV charger funds awarded to 14 states

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Trump officials had ordered states not to spend $5bn given by Biden under national EV infrastructure scheme

A US district judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding funds previously awarded to 14 states for electric vehicle charger infrastructure.

Seattle-based judge Tana Lin, who was appointed to the bench by Joe Biden in 2021, granted a partial injunction to the states that filed suit against Trump’s Department of Transportation.

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‘Clouded in mystery’: how Ice became a rogue agency that does Trump’s bidding

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Shrouded in secrecy, the US law enforcement agency has become a kind of domestic stormtrooper for Maga’s agenda

Across the US, group chats and community threads have started spiking with warnings. Not just the typical alerts about traffic or out of service subway stations, but where and when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid was last seen. What places to avoid. What the plainclothes agents might look like.

“Hey all,” a Brooklyn, New York, resident wrote in a closed chat with neighbors last week. “A little birdie just told me ICE is out.”

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US supreme court clears way for Trump to deport migrants to countries not their own

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Justices lift judicial order, handing victory to US president in his aggressive pursuit of mass deportations

The US supreme court on Monday paved the way for the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to countries they are not from, including to conflict-ridden places such as South Sudan.

In a brief, unsigned order, the court’s conservative supermajority paused the ruling by a Boston-based federal judge who said immigrants deserved a “meaningful opportunity” to bring claims that they would face the risk of torture, persecution or even death if removed to certain countries that have agreed to take people deported from the US.

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Canada and EU sign defence pact amid strained US relations and global instability

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Amid Trump’s disrespect of old allies, EU and Canada vow more support for Ukraine and joint work on climate crisis

Canada has signed a wide-ranging defence pact with the EU, as Donald Trump and global instability prompt traditional US allies to deepen their alliances.

Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, on Monday joined European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and head of the European Council, António Costa, in Brussels, where they signed a security and defence partnership, pledged more support for Ukraine, as well as joint work on issues from the climate crisis to artificial intelligence.

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Trump decision for US to strike Iran splits Maga supporters – US politics live

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Maga diehards caught between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American involvement in foreign conflicts

JD Vance has said the US is “not at war” with Iran – but is with its nuclear weapons program, holding out a position that the White House hopes to maintain over the coming days as the Iranian regime considers a retributive response to Saturday’s US strike on three of its nuclear installations.

In an interview Sunday with NBC News’ Meet the Press, the US vice-president was asked if the US was now at war with Iran.

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‘Handcuffed like we’re criminals’: Ohio teen soccer star recounts deportation

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Emerson Colindres reflects on ‘traumatizing’ ordeal after Ice sent him to Honduras despite having no criminal record

The Ohio high school graduate and soccer standout who was recently deported from the US to Honduras despite having no arrest record has described being “handcuffed like we’re some big criminals” for the entirety of his deportation flight.

“To me, it was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Emerson Colindres, 19, who was brought from Honduras to the US by his family at age eight, said to the Cincinnati news station WCPO in an interview over the weekend.

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Trump’s war with Iran signals perilous shift from showman to strongman

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The emergence of Hawk Trump dismayed some of his Maga base but students of US adventurism were unsurprised

So the military parade that brought tanks to the streets of Washington on Donald Trump’s birthday was more than just an authoritarian ego trip. It was a show of strength and statement of intent.

Exactly a week later, sporting a “Make America great again” (Maga) cap in the situation room, the American president ordered the biggest US military intervention in decades as more than 125 aircraft and 75 weapons – including 14 bunker-busting bombs – struck three Iranian nuclear sites. Trump called it a “spectacular military success” – but it remains unclear how much damage had actually been inflicted.

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David Lammy refuses to say if UK supported US strikes on Iran nuclear facilities

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UK foreign secretary also sidesteps questions on legality of strikes and Donald Trump’s ‘regime change’ post

The UK foreign secretary has repeatedly refused to say if the UK supported the US military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday or whether they were legal.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday for the first time since the US launched airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, David Lammy also sidestepped the question of whether he supported recent social media posts by Donald Trump that seemed to favour regime change in Tehran, saying that in all his discussions in the White House the sole focus had been on military targets.

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Mahmoud Khalil renews devotion to Palestinian freedom at New York rally

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Activist condemns Columbia’s ‘shameful trustees’ but praises students’ courage after release from Ice detention

Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian rights activist, freed from Ice detention on Friday, returned to Columbia University on Sunday to renew his commitment to the cause of Palestinian freedom and opposition to both the university and the Trump administration.

Khalil arrived back in New York on Saturday after being released from more than 100 days in detention in Louisiana by a federal judge who ruled that punishing someone over a civil immigration matter was unconstitutional and ordered his immediate release on bail.

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‘Our era of violent populism’: the US has entered a new phase of political violence

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The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling

It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America.

Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates.

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Trump’s inner circle shifted view to support limited, one-off strike on Iran nuclear sites

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As Trump considered striking Iran, some advisers adjusted public arguments to suggest quick bombing run

Donald Trump’s move to bomb three nuclear sites in Iran came as those inside his orbit who were opposed to US intervention in the conflict shifted their views in favor of a limited and one-off strike.

The US president had been under immense pressure from Republican anti-interventionists not to engage in any action against Iran out of concern that the US might be dragged into a protracted engagement to topple Iran’s leadership, or that strikes on facilities might have limited success.

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Cheering support and instant condemnation: US lawmakers respond to attack on Iran

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Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders denounced the decision to launch attack, while most Republicans praised the action

American politicians reacted to the news of the US bombing of nuclear targets in Iran with a mix of cheering support and instant condemnation, reflecting deep divisions in the country that cross party lines as Washington grapples with yet another military intervention overseas.

Donald Trump announced on Saturday night that the US had completed strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran, directly joining Israel’s effort this month to destroy the country’s nuclear program.

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New Texas law requires Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms

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Governor Greg Abott signs bill into law but challenge expected from critics who consider it unconstitutional

Texas will require all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments under a new law that will make the state the nation’s largest to attempt to impose such a mandate.

The bill, which was signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott, is expected to draw a legal challenge from critics who consider it an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state.

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