Category Archives: US Politics

Trump orders reopening of Alcatraz prison for ‘most ruthless offenders’

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Plan to expand and reuse long-shuttered penitentiary off San Francisco described as ‘not serious’ by Nancy Pelosi

Donald Trump has said he is directing the administration to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco that has been closed for more than 60 years.

California lawmakers called the idea “absurd on its face” and part of the US president’s strategy of political distraction. Other officials pointed to the closure of the prison complex in 1963, known for its brutal conditions, due to operational expense and the high number of (unsuccessful) escape attempts.

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Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’

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President calls films ‘national security threat’ and claims he called on commerce department to immediately enact tariff

Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.

In his post, he claimed to have authorised the commerce department and the US trade representative to immediately begin instituting such a tariff.

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NPR and PBS push back against Trump’s order to cut funding: ‘This could be devastating’

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PBS’s Paula Kerger and NPR’s Katherine Maher say they’re looking at legal options to defend against White House

The heads of embattled US public broadcasters, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), defended themselves against efforts by the Trump administration to cut off taxpayer funding, with both telling a Sunday political talk show they were looking at legal options.

PBS’s chief executive, Paula Kerger, told CBS News’s Face the Nation that Republican-led threats to withdraw federal funding from public broadcasters had been around for decades but are “different this time”.

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Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years found ‘alive and well’

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Audrey Backeberg who disappeared at age 20 in 1962 was found living out of the state, county sheriff’s office says

A Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years has been found “alive and well”, according to authorities.

In a press statement, Wisconsin’s Sauk county sheriff’s office said that 82-year old Audrey Backeberg, who initially disappeared in July 1962 at the age of 20, had been found living out of the state. The sheriff’s office did not disclose which state Backeberg was found in.

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Trump says he ‘doesn’t rule out’ using military force to control Greenland

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President has repeatedly expressed idea of expansion into autonomous territory within fellow Nato member Denmark

Donald Trump would not rule out using military force to gain control of Greenland, the world’s largest island and an autonomous territory within Denmark, a fellow Nato member with the US.

Since taking office, the US president has repeatedly expressed the idea of US expansion into Greenland, triggering widespread condemnation and unease both on the island itself and in the global diplomatic community. Greenland is seen as strategically important both for defense and as a future source of mineral wealth.

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Trump says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold constitutional due process

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President also says he sees himself as leaving office at the end of his current term and not seeking a third one

Donald Trump said “I don’t know” when asked if he needed to uphold the US constitution when it comes to giving immigrants the right of due process as he gave a wide-ranging TV interview broadcast on Sunday.

At the same time the US president also said he saw himself as leaving office at the end of his current term and not seeking a third one – something he has not previously always been consistent on even though a third term is widely seen as unconstitutional.

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Arts agency terminates dozens of grants after Trump proposes eliminating NEA

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National Endowment for the Arts notifies organizations that offers of government grants were terminated

Dozens of US arts organizations have been notified that offers of government grants have been terminated, hours after Donald Trump proposed eliminating federal agencies that support arts, humanities and learning.

The cancellation of grant offers were reported from organizations across the US, including a $25,000 offer to a playhouse in Portland, Oregon, hours before the opening of a new production, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

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Biden aides discussed a cognitive test but decided against it, book reveals

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Debate around Joe Biden’s mental acuity and his age was a critical issue during the run up to the 2024 election

Joe Biden’s top staff debated the possibility of the embattled Democratic president taking a cognitive test last year as he geared up for re-election but eventually decided against the idea, a new book is set to reveal.

Debate around Biden’s mental acuity and his age was an acute issue during the run up to the 2024 election, which eventually saw Biden step down from his re-election campaign in favor of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

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Germany hits back at Marco Rubio after he panned labeling of AfD as ‘extremist’

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Far-right German party was labeled a ‘confirmed rightwing extremist group’ by country’s domestic intelligence service

Germany’s foreign ministry has hit back at the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, following his criticism of Germany’s decision to label the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party as a “confirmed rightwing extremist group”.

On Thursday, Rubio took to X and wrote: “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy – it’s tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD – which took second in the recent election – but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

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‘What is left of our democracy?’: freed Palestinian human rights advocate warns of US authoritarian rule

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Mohsen Mahdawi, student detained by Ice last month, pens blistering attack on Trump’s deportation policies

Mohsen Mahdawi, the Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student freed on Wednesday after more than two weeks in immigration detention, has issued a stark warning about the US’s descent into authoritarianism.

“Once the repression of dissent, in the name of security, becomes a key objective of a government, authoritarian rule and even martial law are not far off. When they look at my case, all Americans should ask themselves: what is left of our democracy, and who will be targeted next?” said Mahddawi in an op-ed for the New York Times.

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Mass resignations at labor department threaten workers in US and overseas, warn staff – as more cuts loom

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Exclusive: Insiders sound alarm over ‘catastrophic’ impact of widespread departures and cuts under Trump

A “catastrophic” exodus of thousands of employees from the US Department of Labor threatens “all of the core aspects of working life”, insiders have warned, amid fears that the Trump administration will further slash the agency’s operations.

The federal agency has already lost about 20% of its workforce, according to employees, as nearly 2,700 staff took retirement, early retirement, deferred resignation buyouts or “fork in the road” departures earlier this year.

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Trump’s Truth Social posts make no sense – what do they say about his mentality?

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The president’s little used social media platform offers him a forum for his nonstop haranguing and score-settling

No political leader has used social media quite like Donald Trump. But his recent posts on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded in 2021, have become increasingly bizarre: the president using the lack of scrutiny afforded by the platform’s small user base to truly let loose.

In the hundreds of “Truths” since he took office, Trump has variously used Truth Social to reimagine himself as a king and to urge Americans to “BE COOL!” as the stock market tanked in the wake of his trade war, the president’s seemingly random use of capital letters, punctuation and inaccurate spelling consistent across the messages.

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Woman in Florida deported to Cuba says she was forced to leave baby daughter

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Heidy Sánchez says she was told her 17-month-old, who has health problems and is breastfeeding, couldn’t go with her

A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.

Heidy Sánchez was told she was being detained for deportation to Cuba when she turned up at her scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) check-in appointment in Tampa, Florida, last week.

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Trump signs executive order to cut funding for public broadcasters

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President says neither NPR nor PBS ‘presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events’


Donald Trump has signed an executive order seeking to cut public funding for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of being biased.

NPR and PBS are only partly funded by the US taxpayer and rely heavily on private donations.

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Trump officials ask supreme court to help strip legal status from Venezuelans

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Justice department calls on court to hold judge’s order against ending temporary protected status for 300,000

The Trump administration asked the US supreme court on Thursday to intervene and assist in its attempt to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants in the US, a move that would clear the way for their deportation.

The justice department asked the supreme court justices to put on hold a federal judge’s order from March that halted the decision of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to terminate the temporary legal status that previously was granted to some Venezuelans.

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Trump tariffs cause fastest slump in British factory export orders in five years

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Decline in output and new orders in April allied with rising uncertainty is prompting layoffs, survey finds

Britain’s factories suffered a slump in export orders last month as Donald Trump’s globally unsettling tariff regime sent overseas demand for UK goods tumbling at the fastest pace in five years.

Manufacturers reported rising economic and trade uncertainties in April as some tariffs took effect and other threatened border taxes loomed, forcing them to lay off workers for a sixth consecutive month.

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DoJ civil rights division suffers severe personnel reduction under Trump

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More than 250 lawyers have left or been reassigned since January as critics fear ‘end of the division as we’ve known it’

More than 250 attorneys in the justice department’s civil rights division have either left, been reassigned, or accepted a buyout offer since January , according to an estimate provided to the Guardian by people familiar with the matter. The significant decrease in personnel underscores how Donald Trump is gutting the arm of the federal government responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws.

About 235 attorneys in the division’s civil enforcement sections have accepted buyouts or have quit the justice department and roughly another 20 have been reassigned or detailed to do other work within the agency, including handling public records requests and internal agency complaints.

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Private firms look to fill research gaps left by federal grant cuts: ‘We can’t wait four years’

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Trump and Musk have gut National Institutes of Health and experts are wary of private efforts’ ability to replicate public service

The federal government has slashed research since Donald Trump took office – hacking away at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its grants, staff and long-held partnerships with academia.

Now, some private companies said they want to pick up strands of research that might have otherwise been funded by the federal government. The effort has stoked little optimism among experts, who caution that private efforts cannot remotely replicate the breadth, depth or public service provided by federal funding.

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Trump’s attack on federal unions a ‘test case’ for broader assault, warn lawyers

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Executive order cites national security to strip bargaining rights from more than 1 million federal workers

The Trump administration is seeking to strip collective bargaining rights from large swaths of federal employees in a test case union leaders argue is part of a broader attack on US labor unions that could land before the US Supreme Court.

A Trump win would deliver a severe blow to labor unions in the US. Some 29.9% of all federal workers were represented by labor unions in 2024 compared to 11.1% for all US workers.

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US and Ukraine sign minerals deal that solidifies investment in Kyiv’s defense against Russia

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Move seals a deal to create a fund the Trump administration says will begin to repay roughly $175bn provided to Ukraine

The US and Kyiv have signed an agreement to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, sealing a deal that Donald Trump has said will provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defense and its reconstruction after he brokers a peace deal with Russia.

The minerals deal, which has been the subject of tense negotiations for months and nearly fell through hours before it was signed, will establish a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund that the Trump administration has said will begin to repay an estimated $175bn in aid provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war.

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