Politics

Surely just a coincidence.

“You have a lion, a bear, an alligator and… a squirrel. OK, which is the squirrel?” Trump recounted at the event.

Stronger borders don’t deter desperate souls fleeing war zones, the climate crisis or economic hardship. Not when they can be circumvented. As a travel journalist, I cross borders for a living. In the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, I saw how African migrants risked death to swim around the razor-wire fences and watchtowers guarding the EU’s land border with Morocco. Mexican cartels have carved long and sophisticated tunnels beneath Trump’s wall.

On Saturday night, a lone gunman attacked the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, sending off the predictable wave of condemnations of political violence by U.S. public officials, from federal legislators to state officials. As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it, “Political violence has no place in America.” But there seems to be plenty of room for violence of the apparently nonpolitical sort: federal immigration agencies have used the recent push for mass deportations to accelerate their long and violent history with high-profile murders on the street and in their detention centers; as of April 23, the U.S. military has killed at least 186 people in a consistent campaign of bombings in Latin American waters; and there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondent’s Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.

Governor called referendum after president urged GOP-led states to redraw maps to protect House majority

President Donald Trump has now been in office for about 15 months, and his numbers keep getting worse. Our latest Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted April 10–14, finds just 35% of U.S. adults approving of his job performance, with 61% disapproving — a net approval rating of -26. That’s a new low in our poll, down from -23 last month and a steep fall from (an already poor) -16 when we first began tracking this question in May 2025.

Whether the first hundred days become a foundation or a high-water mark depends partly on Albany. The budget gap Mamdani inherited from previous city and state administrations constrains new investment, and his largest revenue proposal, the wealth tax, requires the governor and state legislature to act. But the trajectory is already set. By fall, 2,000 two-year-olds will have full-day, full-year childcare seats that did not exist in January. By 2027, a city-run grocery store will open in East Harlem selling subsidized food on the same spot where LaGuardia built one ninety years ago. Those cost money the way fire departments and public schools cost money: because delivering the service is the point.

The Hungarian prime minister concedes to Péter Magyar, who is set to win a supermajority in the 199-seat parliament.

A year after the NDP suffered its worst electoral defeat in party history, new leader Avi Lewis stood on stage at the party’s convention and promised its renewal.

The White House’s plans to completely annihilate Iran are so haphazard that even the vice president can’t keep up with them.

President Trump kicked off Easter Sunday with a foul-mouthed tirade against Iran and praising Allah — warning the regime to “open the f—in’” Strait of Hormuz or else he will ensure the Islamic Republic’s leaders end up in hell.

Trump told the man who controls 12% of the world’s oil to kiss his ass. That man just restructured Middle Eastern security with Ukraine, telling Trump, “It’s over”.

US supreme court justice Samuel Alito was reportedly taken to a hospital after becoming sick at a Federalist Society dinner in Philadelphia in March, further fueling speculation that Donald Trump could have more chances to shape the land’s highest court through new appointments.

The International Energy Agency has described the disruption as the largest supply shock in the history of the global oil market.

With the unveiling of the prospective Trump presidential library, which, in its timing and substance looked for all the world like an April fool, the old adage that you can’t gild a turd but you can roll it in glitter has become bleakly redundant. It turns out that you can most definitely gild a turd.

This is something that has been so well hidden from doomscrollers that when the switch finally flips, they will plead ignorance. Which is accurate, but aren’t these the same people who “do their own research”?

There will no doubt be shenanigans as this proposal eventually moves forward. Must be nice to get a paid two-week Easter break in a secular country.

I am lead counsel in the challenge to Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. As I and my team help the ACLU legal director, Cecillia Wang, prepare for the supreme court argument in this case on Wednesday, we are poring over legal minutiae and sharpening our arguments. But the larger questions that loom over the whole case are simple: What does it mean to be an American? Will we adhere to the best of American history and protect the values of equal citizenship and opportunity?

I’ll say this for Bernie: You always know what you’re in for.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments over the legality and constitutionality of Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship in the United States.

When US federal workers were missing paychecks and the partial government shutdown entered its seventh week, Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, was doing what any responsible lawmaker would do: riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand at Disney World in Florida.

What will it take to invoke the 25th Amendment?

Noel Frame knows exactly how difficult it is to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy, because she has been trying to do just that – first as an activist, then as a state legislator – for the past 15 years. And until recently almost all of her efforts ended in failure.

The meeting on Sunday of the foreign ministers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in Islamabad not only represented the best hope for a ceasefire in Iran but was also the embryo for a new order designed to curb Israeli and Iranian dominance after the war.

The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

Wherever you go, there you are, the saying goes. It was a lesson Donald Trump’s Maga faithful may have been reminded of last week when they gathered in a convention center near Dallas for a revival of the president’s political movement, only to find that there was no escape from the problems it faces.

In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.

Four weeks into a war that was going to take four days, and that has so far cost the US about $30-40bn and Israel $300m a day, Washington is further away from a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was in May 2025.

From Wall Street to the White House, the dish everyone’s talking about this week is the Persian Taco. It’s what’s served when Trump chickens out in Iran.

Yeah, that’s not a great look in a dual-language country, especially when your headquarters is in Quebec.

I refused to file my taxes last year after Trump had already started engaging in excursions from democratic norms. It’s like an abusive spouse demanding alimony during a contentious divorce.

The Trump administration’s “Make America healthy again” (Maha) agenda appears to be stalled as two of the government’s most influential public health positions sit empty.

To explore the roots of Donald Trump’s Iran military strategy and the pugilistic rhetoric of his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, means looking back 105 years. In 1921, a year before Benito Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome to launch the Fascist era, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet published The Command of the Air, proposing a revolution in warfare.

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law—but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two years, allowing Congress to continue the important work of negotiating a warrant requirement for Americans as well as some other critical reforms.

Donald Trump has described voting by mail as “cheating” at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, just days after casting a mail‑in ballot himself.

“Exhaustion” is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough.

For decades, the US and its allies have painted Iran as the world’s biggest sponsor of state terrorism – invoking its Islamic rulers’ supposed revolutionary fanaticism and determined support for militant proxies.

A couple of weekends ago, as dusk was falling over the Escandón neighbourhood of Mexico City, Abel Ortiz was startled by the sound of two American women yelling at each other on the street outside his apartment.

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

Coincidentally, five days from today is No Kings. Anything to keep Epstein out of the news.

Heads up for anyone planning on attending this weekend and would like preparatory knowledge.

Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to deploy federal immigration agents to US airports on Monday if Democrats do not agree to measures aimed at strengthening security and immigration enforcement.

When Donald Trump revealed that Republican congressman Neal Dunn would have been “dead by June” if not for White House doctors who treated the representative’s reportedly terminal condition, many were shocked by his disclosure.

The first six days of Donald Trump’s war against Iran cost a whopping $11.3 billion, according to a report from the Pentagon given to Congress earlier this month. The pricetag is expected to continue climbing — exponentially.

A bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security failed to advance on Friday in the Senate amid growing concerns about long lines to get through screening at some of the country’s biggest airports.

http://archive.today/fHN5n

It was another date which will live in infamy. But whereas President Franklin Roosevelt declared war in sombre tones to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump did it his way.

TEL AVIV — The U.S. and Israel have launched strikes against Iran with the goal of toppling the regime, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found that the IRS had erroneously shared the taxpayer information of thousands of people with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the agencies’ controversial agreement to share information on immigrants for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S.

We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.

As energy prices for US households soar nationwide, Democratic and progressive lawmakers are calling on the energy department to stop increasing exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

He said it was going to be long. He wasn’t lying.

As Trump entered the chamber, Green held up a sign reading “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES!” and remained standing as Trump began his speech.

“When will we see justice?” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) demanded on the House floor Tuesday in a sharp rebuke of the U.S. Department of Justice over its handling of the government’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.

When I arrived at the food distribution center on a weekday afternoon, the line looked like it was a hundred people long. It brought to mind a photo of a bread line from the Great Depression era.

Apparently, it’s only OK when Trump and his Epstein friends do it.

I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.

You wouldn’t be alone if you feel that the US more closely resembles North Korea these days – with giant images of the dear leader scowling down on the citizenry, and his name inscribed everywhere from public buildings to street signs, transportation hubs and self-aggrandizing monuments.

I think someone needed his diaper changed, if only for this one line:

God, booking a flight is going to be really tedious by the time all airports are named after this asshole. I’d prefer the outcome where all restaurants are Taco Bell.