Category Archives: US Politics

Trump says he hopes to meet Kim Jong-un and raises prospect of US taking over some South Korean land

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South Korean president Lee Jae Myung uses Oval Office meeting to encourage Trump to engage with North Korean leader

Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, possibly this year, in an attempt to revive the failed nuclear diplomacy of his first term as US president.

“I’d like to have a meeting. I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong-un in the appropriate future,” Trump said during an occasionally awkward meeting at the Oval Office with South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, in which he raised the prospect of taking ownership of South Korean land that hosts a US military base.

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Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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Pentagon official confirms plan as House minority leader Jeffries says president is ‘playing’ with Americans’ lives

Planning is underway to send national guard troops to Chicago, an official at the Pentagon confirmed to ABC News on Sunday.

“We won’t speculate on further operations. The Department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel,” a Department of Defense official said, according to ABC.

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France summons US ambassador Charles Kushner over antisemitism allegations

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Kushner says in letter to Macron he’s concerned over ‘rise of antisemitism’ and ‘lack of sufficient action’ to confront it

France summoned the American ambassador Charles Kushner after he wrote a letter to President Emmanuel Macron alleging France had failed to do enough to stem antisemitic violence, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

Kushner, who is Jewish and whose son is married to US President Donald Trump’s daughter, published the open letter in the Wall Street Journal amid deep divides between France and the US and Israel.

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Russia says Europe’s leaders don’t want peace in Ukraine as Vance says US will keep trying

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Russian foreign minister praises Trump’s effort and got defensive when asked if Putin was ‘stringing along’ Trump

Russia accused western European leaders on Sunday of not wanting peace in Ukraine, as Moscow’s most senior diplomat praised efforts by Donald Trump to end the war, while Vice-President JD Vance said the US would “keep on trying” to broker talks in the absence of a deal.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, made the comments during a sometimes contentious interview on NBC on Sunday morning, during which he denied his country had bombed civilian targets in Ukraine.

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Zohran Mamdani leads in fundraising for New York City mayoral contest

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The Democratic nominee far outpaces former governor Andrew Cuomo and embattled incumbent Eric Adams

Zohran Mamdani pulled in almost double the funds of his nearest rivals for New York City mayor between early July and mid-August, as the candidates prepare for the crucial post Labor Day push to the November poll.

New York’s City’s campaign finance board said on Saturday that the democratic socialist, who won the Democratic party nomination in June against former state governor Andrew Cuomo, raised $1,051,200, with an average donation of $121 recorded equally from donors in and outside the state.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene joins Bernie Sanders in urging US to end Gaza famine

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Breaking from most of her peers in Congress, far-right Georgia Republican has also described crisis as a genocide

Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.

“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”

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US immigration officials intend to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda

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Salvadorian refused offer of deportation to Costa Rica before he was released to await trial on human smuggling charges

US immigration officials said they intend to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda, after he declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.

The Costa Rica offer came late on Thursday, after it was clear that the Salvadorian national would probably be released from a Tennessee jail the following day.

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Judge blocks White House from defunding 34 municipalities over ‘sanctuary’ policies

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Cities that limit cooperation with immigration authorities had sued Trump administration over funding freeze

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funding to 34 “sanctuary cities” and counties that limit cooperation with federal immigration law enforcement, significantly expanding a previous order.

The order, issued on Friday by the San Francisco-based US district judge William Orrick, adds Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Boston, Baltimore, Denver and Albuquerque, to cities that the administration is barred from denying funding.

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Texas prepares for final approval of Republican map as senator threatens to filibuster

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Carol Alvarado posted on social media: ‘Republicans think they can walk all over us. Today I’m going to kick back’

The Texas legislature preliminarily approved a redrawn congressional map on Friday that gives Republicans a chance to pick up as many as five congressional seats, fulfilling a brazen political request from Donald Trump to shore up the GOP’s standing before next year’s midterm elections.

The tentative map adoption passed in an 18-11 party-line vote.

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Eswatini government faces court challenge over men deported by US

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Group of NGOs claim deal was unconstitutional and violated the imprisoned men’s human rights

A group of NGOs is challenging Eswatini’s acceptance of five people deported by the US, arguing the deal was unconstitutional and violated the imprisoned men’s human rights.

The men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, who the US said were dangerous criminals, were flown to the small southern African country in July, as the Trump administration attempts to deport millions of migrants and asylum seekers.

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Trump administration accused of wanting to revoke visas ‘based on speech, not conduct’ – US politics live

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State department reviewing records of more than 55 million US visa holders for potential revocation

The US vice-president, JD Vance, previewed in Georgia on Thursday the lines of attack candidates will use to defend the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the midterms next year, calling it “the biggest tax cut for families that this country has ever seen”.

Vance touted an increase in the child tax credit, the elimination of taxes on overtime and on tips in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act while speaking in a warehouse for ATLA Refrigeration in Peachtree City, Georgia.

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Government workers are ‘canary in coalmine’ for Trump bid to gut union rights, leaders warn

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Administration has stripped hundreds of thousands of their union contracts as White House says it is just getting started

The Trump administration has unilaterally stripped hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their union contracts after a federal appeals court overruled an injunction which halted the plans. It is just getting started, according to the White House.

An executive order issued in March sought to cancel all collective bargaining agreements for most federal employees, citing national security concerns – and remove collective bargaining rights from more than a million workers.

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LA Ice protests spurred US military to identify ‘hotels to avoid’ due to ‘harassment’

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Exclusive: Organizers disrupted Trump’s immigration crackdown by targeting hotels where officers were staying, documents show

When Donald Trump’s administration escalated immigration raids in Los Angeles earlier this summer, protest organizers responded with actions staged in an unusual setting: the hotels where immigration officers were staying.

Protests took place at several southern California hotels where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents had been spotted. Some activists launched “No sleep for Ice” rallies, with chants and music blaring through the night, in hopes of pressuring the hotels to kick agents out.

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California legislature approves first of three redistricting bills in response to Texas gerrymandering

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Assembly passes measure 57-20, sending it next to the state senate before on to governor Gavin Newsom

The California assembly on Thursday approved the first in a series of three bills designed to redraw congressional boundaries and create five potential new Democratic US House seats.

The effort in California is an answer to the Republican redistricting push in Texas, sought by Donald Trump and aimed at tilting the map in his party’s favor before next year’s midterm elections.

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Trump officials cut California sex-education funds over gender identity references

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Move comes after state refused to remove gender identity, trans and nonbinary references from sex-ed curriculum

The Trump administration has terminated a grant that provided millions of dollars for a California sex education program after the state refused to remove all references to gender identity, transgender people and nonbinary people from its curriculum.

Advocates fear more states could lose more money in a burgeoning war between the Trump administration and supporters of comprehensive sex ed.

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US court allows Trump officials to end protected status for 60,000 migrants

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Administration officials given legal right to move towards deportation of people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua

A federal appeals court on Wednesday sided with the Trump administration and halted for now a lower court’s order that had kept in place temporary protections for 60,000 migrants from Central America and Nepal.

This means that the Republican administration can move toward removing an estimated 7,000 people from Nepal whose temporary protected status designations expired on 5 August. The TPS designations and legal status of 51,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans are set to expire 8 September, at which point they will become eligible for removal.

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Non-binary park ranger fired for hanging trans pride flag in Yosemite

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Shannon ‘SJ’ Joslin among group who hung 66ft flag on El Capitan as others could face prosecution under protest laws

A Yosemite national park ranger was fired after hanging a pride flag from El Capitan, while some park visitors could face prosecution under protest restrictions that have been tightened under Donald Trump.

Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who studies bats, said they hung a 66ft-wide transgender pride flag on the famous climbing wall that looms over the California park’s main thoroughfare for about two hours on 20 May before taking it down voluntarily. A termination letter they received last week accused Joslin of “failing to demonstrate acceptable conduct” in their capacity as a biologist and cited the May incident.

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US health agency workers accuse RFK Jr of fueling violence against them

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Over 750 workers in a letter said HHS secretary’s rhetoric played a role in recent attack at CDC’s Atlanta headquarters

More than 750 current and former federal health employees on Wednesday accused health and human services (HHS) secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr of fueling harassment and violence directed at government healthcare staff.

In a letter sent to Kennedy and members of Congress, the group accuses RFK Jr of contributing to “the harassment and violence experienced by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staff”, citing decisions such as removing members from a CDC vaccine advisory panel, questioning the safety of the measles vaccine, and firing key CDC staff as actions that sow distrust in federal medical professionals.

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Texas can’t require public schools to display Ten Commandments in class, judge rules

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Law temporarily blocked after group sought preliminary injunction, saying it violated first amendment protections

Texas cannot require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, a judge said on Wednesday in a temporary ruling against the state’s new requirement, making it the third such state law to be blocked by a court.

A group of Dallas-area families and faith leaders sought a preliminary injunction against the law, which goes into effect on 1 September. They say the requirement violates the first amendment’s protections for the separation of church and state and the right to free religious exercise.

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Uganda denies reports that it has struck deal with Trump to take in US deportees

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Ugandan official said the east African country does not have the capability to take in undocumented immigrants

Uganda said it has not reached any agreement with the US to take in undocumented immigrants, contradicting reports that the east African country had struck a deal with the Trump administration to do so.

Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda’s state minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters the country does not have the capability to take in immigrants. It comes as the US has deported migrants convicted of crimes in the US to non-native countries including South Sudan and Eswatini.

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