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Politics
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Maurene Comey ruling offers hope of check on Trump’s assault on rule of law
Legal experts welcome judge’s rejection of firing of James Comey’s daughter prosecutor but warn an appeal is likely A recent legal ruling against an effort to fire the star-prosecutor daughter of a former FBI chief targeted by Donald Trump could send a strong message about politicized firings – and influence other judges weighing similar cases, legal veterans said. Judge Jesse Furman ruled this week that the Department of Justice’s firing of assistant US attorney Maurene Comey without cause was unlawful. Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, successfully litigated numerous high-profile cases during her tenure at the southern district of New York, including guilty verdicts against Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean “Diddy” Combs. Continue reading...
UK charity shop profits plummet amid shift in secondhand clothes market
Oxfam describes ‘exceptionally challenging’ trading after retail profit reportedly fell 23% year on year Profits at some of the UK’s best-known charity shops have plummeted as they face a number of pressures, including from online secondhand clothes platforms, prompting claims that a key part of the sector’s fundraising model could be under threat. According to unpublished accounts seen by the Financial Times , Oxfam’s retail profit fell 23% to £4.9m in the last financial year, compared with £6.4m in the previous year. Continue reading...
More than 100 protest against Palestine Action ban outside US embassy in London
Police start arresting demonstrators with Met commander alleging they are ‘essentially meeting to purposefully commit a crime’ Police have started making arrests at the first mass demonstration under Andy Burnham’s premiership opposing the proscription of Palestine Action. More than 100 people gathered outside the US embassy in Battersea, south London, holding signs that read: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Continue reading...
How Trump and his allies seek to interfere the US midterm elections
The administration’s efforts have raised concerns among experts about potential disruptions after election day Donald Trump is waging a brazen effort to interfere with voting in this year’s midterm elections, escalating concerns that the federal government will try to slow down certification of election results – a strategy that could create chaos when the new Congress is seated next year. Experts are certain the administration’s efforts to subvert America’s elections will not work. And some have bemoaned “fearmongering” about far-fetched scenarios that are unlikely to go anywhere in court. Continue reading...
Starmer says UK must get closer to Europe as US relationship changes
Shift in dealings with Washington not likely to reset once Trump leaves Oval Office, former PM says The UK and other European nations must draw closer together as the US becomes a less-reliable partner, Keir Starmer has said in his first significant political intervention since leaving No 10. The former prime minister warned European leaders of the threat posed by Russia, among others, and said the shift in relations with Washington during Donald Trump’s presidency was not likely to reset once he leaves the Oval Office. He accused them of being caught out by these new realities twice already. Continue reading...
UK police should not have let US force take over airbase trial, MoD documents show
According to documents obtained by the Guardian, officials accused Cambridgeshire force of breaching US-UK deal by handing over case of woman strangled by US pilot Ministry of Defence officials have privately accused a UK police force of wrongly handing over the investigation of an American fighter pilot who strangled a British woman to the US military, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Cambridgeshire police allowed the US military police to quickly take control of the investigation into Capt Jacob Wulfson after he had been accused of sexually assaulting Sarah Steele in his Cambridge flat. Continue reading...
Judge bars DoJ from threats to election workers as Trump to hold tele-rallies three days before elections – live
With control of Congress on the line, next week’s midterms amount to a referendum on Trump, who has urged voters to pretend he is on the ballot Sign up for the Breaking News US email It’s a good time to be a coal plant in the US. The Trump administration has given support to almost half of the nation’s coal plants, helping them to continue operating despite economic and regulatory headwinds, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund. The analysis, which looked at the 184 operating coal plants that are connected to the grid, found that 90 received support from the Trump administration through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates”. The top federal prosecutor in Alaska confirmed on Friday the existence of a criminal and a civil investigation into an alleged scheme by Mary Peltola’s campaign and national Democrats to confuse voters in the closely watched Senate race by recruiting a spoiler candidate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan . Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed resisted a demand from his defeated primary rival, congresswoman Haley Stevens , that he apologize for criticism of US military aid to Israel on Friday – two days before they were scheduled to campaign together in Detroit. Early voting this cycle has set a record. More than 49 million Americans have already cast ballots, either in person or by mail, the Associated Press reported. Continue reading...
Affordability, AI and Iran: Americans on the key issues guiding their midterm votes
Guardian readers share their concerns and disillusionment with the political climate under Trump as elections loom Millions of Americans will head to the polls on 3 November in elections that will determine control of the Republican-held House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships of 36 states. The midterms come amid mounting public frustration over issues ranging from the rising cost of living and immigration to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, big tech and the US’s overseas wars. Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36% , according to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted this month. Continue reading...
Trump boosted half of US coal plants with taxpayer dollars and ‘free passes to pollute’, report says
Environmental Defense Fund analysis shows administration handed out $950m and Clean Air Act exemptions It’s a good time to be a coal plant in the US. The Trump administration has given support to almost half of the nation’s coal plants, helping them to continue operating despite economic and regulatory headwinds, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund. The analysis, which looked at the 184 operating coal plants that are connected to the grid, found that 90 received support from the Trump administration through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates”. Continue reading...
Día de los Muertos celebrations rise from the dead as ICE arrests continue: ‘It’s important to bring joy in dark times’
After canceling events in 2025, US cities including Henderson, Kentucky, are reviving public Day of the Dead events Julia, a 19-year-old born in the US, and her parents, undocumented immigrants from Mexico, enjoyed attending the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration each year in Henderson, Kentucky, and selling aguas frescas, horchatas and a sweet bread traditionally eaten on the Mexican holiday. Last year, her family also built an ofrenda , or altar, featuring flowers and a violin, to honor her grandfather, who played the instrument and died in 2023 in Mexico. Continue reading...
Hear me out: maybe Norway should give Melania Trump the Nobel peace prize | Arwa Mahdawi
The first lady has been praised for ‘singlehandedly’ brokering a ceasefire in a Ukrainian city – though she might have had some help Haters be damned: Donald Trump just keeps on winning. He won the inaugural Fifa peace prize last year and was presented with the completely real, totally not made-up “Man of the Century” award at a recent rally . The president has also spent the greater part of a decade claiming he was once crowned Michigan’s Man of the Year: a fantastic achievement considering there is no such award and Trump has never lived in Michigan. But despite his many trophies , there is one honour that has proved elusive: the Nobel peace prize. Trump holds a bit of a grudge about that, recently terming Norway a “shithouse country” for passing him over for the award. In response, the country’s tourism board highlighted some of its nicest public lavatories with the tagline: “Norway makes shit houses great again!” Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...
Mill 19: a creative hub built into a former steel factory
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylviania, a post-industrial site gets a second life Continue reading...
This rightwing evangelical was one of Trump’s biggest backers. Why isn’t he talking about the midterms?
Lance Wallnau has gathered supporters to talk about Charlie Kirk and school boards – with no mention of GOP One of Donald Trump’s most influential Christian nationalist backers has privately shied away from rallying supporters for the Republican party before the midterms, instead urging them to focus their attention elsewhere – including emulating El Salvador and Poland, finding a successor for Charlie Kirk and even focusing on their own diets. At the “As One” weekend for paying “partners” in the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier this month, Lance Wallnau, one of the first prominent rightwing evangelicals to back Trump in 2015, spoke across three sessions about the virtues of El Salvador’s prison system, school boards and the movement’s future. The midterms, then little more than three weeks away, were not mentioned once. Continue reading...
Healey to veto new offshore wind projects if they will not lower bills
Chancellor’s plans add to concerns that government is moving away from pro-renewables agenda John Healey has said he will veto new offshore wind projects if they will not lower bills, adding to concerns that the government is moving away from the pro-renewables agenda. Announcing his plans, the chancellor said clean power is “how we break the grip of international gas prices on our bills” but added the shift towards it “has to come at the right pace, in the right places, with the grid to carry it”. Continue reading...
France braced for fresh unrest as 70,000 police deployed across 150 planned demonstrations – Europe live
French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, warned earlier this week of a ‘very high risk of public disorder’ France is bracing for a third weekend of protests, with police deploying 70,000 officers in an effort to prevent a repeat of the riots and looting that have swept the country in recent weeks. Nationwide protests over the rising cost of living and the deteriorating education system have drawn hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. Some demonstrations have descended into violence, with widespread looting and vandalism reported on 17 October. Continue reading...
Election integrity, extremism and Pete Hegseth: nine voters on the US midterm election
Days away from a national verdict on Trump 2.0, we check in with nine midterm voters across the US and the political spectrum US voters will soon deliver a national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump . On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office. Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the US voting system, what they hope Congress will tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. Continue reading...
Men detained at Texas’s ‘dog pound’ ICE facility describe their experience – in art, letters and song
Nearly 500 men are detained at the T Don Hutto detention facility, and many have risked sharing their experiences in a unique way What goes on inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ) detention centers across the US happens behind closed doors and high fences. Personal accounts of lengthy detention, misery and sickness and allegations of abuse rarely reach the public directly while people are still behind bars. Continue reading...
Railway engineering work over Christmas will cause 10 days of disruption
London Paddington and Birmingham New Street stations will shut for five days but most routes will stay open Passengers travelling on some of Great Britain’s busiest railway lines at Christmas have been warned of significant disruption from 10 days of engineering works. Work will close London’s Paddington station – affecting intercity trains to the west of England and Wales until January – as well as Birmingham New Street, the UK’s busiest station outside the capital, for five days over the holiday period. Continue reading...
Top Democrats are fighting a billionaire tax in California. Their voters are on the other side |
The unprecedented measure has enormous potential nationwide. The clash exposes the party’s corporate-progressive divide Midway through this summer, a high-quality poll found that Democrats in California were overwhelmingly in favor of the upcoming ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth. The ratio was more than 4 to 1. But the state’s most powerful Democrats – including the governor Gavin Newsom, his near-certain successor Xavier Becerra and the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass – have lined up with Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve raised upward of $340m to defeat the initiative. Continue reading...
Streeting says he began stockpiling food weeks ago amid rising threat to UK
Defence secretary says value for money and modernisation key for defence spending to ‘fight the wars ahead’ Wes Streeting started stockpiling food and water in case of a national emergency weeks ago, the defence secretary has said, as he talked up the threats to the UK and said his department has already begun ramping up its spending in response. Streeting spoke after the chancellor, John Healey, said he wanted defence spending to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 and 3.5% by 2035; having already asked Whitehall departments to find 1% cuts in their budgets for long-term investment to fund defence spending. Continue reading...
Fallon Sherrock pulls off shock defeat of world darts No 1 Luke Littler in live TV battle
The 15th amateur to challenge Littler in Netflix stream on Friday evening, Sherrock was ‘lost for words’ after winning £501,000 prize The name of the programme was Beat Luke Littler, and Fallon Sherrock did just that. On one of the biggest nights of the year for British TV, Netflix, too, there was much at stake: not just £501,000 to any of the 20 amateur challengers who managed to beat Littler in a single leg of darts, but also the jeopardy of whether audiences would choose to watch the streamer’s first UK live entertainment event – or the final of BBC juggernaut Celebrity Traitors. Continue reading...
Trump beware: US voters are concerned about government corruption
Alleged self-dealing by the president and his allies doesn’t look so good as corruption emerges as a key issue for midterm voters Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds Voters under 50 probably won’t remember the “ welfare queen ”. But she once embodied Republicans’ claim of the underlying reason for US societal decay: the poor are a bunch of fraudsters. Ronald Reagan introduced Linda Taylor to US voters at a rally during the Republican presidential primary season in 1976. A resident of Chicago’s South Side, Taylor had been arrested for welfare fraud. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, five phone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veteran’s benefits for four non-existing deceased veteran husbands,” Reagan said. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.” The Qatari government gifted him a luxury jet , potentially violating the emoluments clause of the constitution. The UAE gained access to some tightly guarded, high-end American AI chips soon after an investment firm linked to its ruling family secretly bought a $500m stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company funded by the families of Trump and his chum Steve Witkoff. Rich people facing criminal charges have taken to donating to Trump’s political operations and then seeking pardons or clemency. Most recently, Wanda Vázquez Garced , the former governor of Puerto Rico, and the banker who paid her bribes, Julio Herrera Velutini, were pardoned after Velutini’s family gave a $50m deal to Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and donated $3.5m to Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac. The first family is also making a killing from the government. The Pentagon lent more than $600m to Vulcan Elements, a rare earths startup, just three months after Donald Jr’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital bought a stake in the outfit. Powerus, a drone maker backed by Eric and Donald Jr is selling drone interceptors to Persian Gulf allies of the US that are under attack by Iran, enriching the kids from a misbegotten war launched by the dad without consulting Congress. Continue reading...
The real problem with Britain’s Political Traitors show is that no one is very faithful to anything for long | Robert Hutton
For Westminster’s special budget edition of the series, politicians have played to their strengths. Bombast, duplicity, distrust: it’s all second nature You join us on a steam train in Scotland as we head to the next episode of the BBC’s hit show Political Traitors. It’s like the celebrity edition, except that everyone is less comely – politics being the practice of show business for ugly people . For this week’s task, the players have to construct a “budget” of tiny crowd-pleasing measures, carefully balanced by invisible tax rises. What makes the show so compelling is that the players don’t know the whole story. Only those of us on the outside can see what’s really going on. While John and Andy run around shouting about how they have faithfully met their “fiscal rules” in the third year of the forecasts, on our sofas at home we know that this incantation is entirely meaningless. Robert Hutton is a journalist and author Continue reading...
The staggering $446m Elon Musk has spent on the US midterms – visualized
The tech mogul’s midterm donations backing Republicans have made him the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history Elon Musk has poured so much money into US politics this midterms election cycle that his donations could fund half a dozen SpaceX rocket launches or buy thousands of Tesla Cybertrucks. At the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles , Musk could order more than 31.9m cheeseburgers with the money he has spent on the midterms. Musk, the world’s richest person, has funnelled at least $445.77m into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, according to US Federal Election Commission data as of 29 October. The contributions have made him the Republicans’ most prominent financial backer and the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history. Continue reading...