Lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving an impasse over much-criticized agency’s funding
The Department of Homeland Security has begun a partial shutdown, after funding for the much-criticized agency expired, with a range of services, including domestic flights and the US Coastguard, now vulnerable to disruption.
The shutdown was all but confirmed on Thursday, after the Senate failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass the DHS appropriations bill and lawmakers left Washington for a long weekend without resolving the impasse.
Democratic representative also condemns US capture of Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and US support for Israel’s war on Gaza – key US politics stories from Friday, 13 February at a glance
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of tearing apart the transatlantic alliance with Europe and of seeking to introduce an “age of authoritarianism”, as she condemned his administration’s foreign policy in front of its allies’ top policymakers at the Munich security conference.
Speaking at a panel on populism on Friday, the New York representative outlined what she called an “alternative vision” for a leftwing US foreign policy, challenging the Trump administration’s shift to the right in front an audience of US allies who have grown increasingly wary of the US’s increasingly nationalist – and militaristic – global posture.
Centers would have capacity for tens of thousands of people to be held; talks over funding bill stall hours before shutdown
The annual rate of US inflation eased in January, according to the latest data consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the last 12 months, the cost of goods has increased by 2.4% – down from 2.7% in last month’s report.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate left Washington on Thursday as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) heads for another shutdown, when stopgap funding lapses tonight. Nearly all Democrats blocked a second attempt to pass the annual DHS appropriations bill as negotiations for guardrails on federal immigration enforcement have stalled. Senator John Fetterman was the only lawmaker to break ranks with the party.
Some of the world’s most corrupt countries have received huge payments in controversial third-country deportation scheme
The Trump administration has spent more than $1m per person to deport some migrants to countries they have no connection to, only to see many sent back to their home nations at further taxpayer expense, according to a new congressional investigation.
A 30-page report from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats, released on Thursday and shared with the Guardian, details how the US government paid more than $32m to five foreign governments – including some of the world’s most corrupt regimes – to accept approximately 300 third-country nationals deported from the US.
Analysis shows that the world is moving closer to China, as Trump’s isolationism rears its head at the United Nations
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has accelerated a profound shift in the global order, according to new analysis.
A report from Focaldata, which analyses UN voting records, reveals how Washington’s “America First” agenda has started to redraw the geopolitical map in favour of China.
European leaders divided over how far to accommodate Trump’s ‘wrecking ball’ politics and foreign policy
US Democrats will use a security summit this weekend to urge European leaders to stand up to Donald Trump, with the continent divided over how to keep the unpredictable US president on side.
Democrats at the annual Munich Security Conference will include some of Trump’s most outspoken critics, such as the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Arizona senator Ruben Gallego and the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.
Scott Socha, whose company sued to claim trademark rights to Yosemite name, criticized by conservation groups
Donald Trump has nominated the hospitality executive Scott Socha – whose company once sued to claim trademark rights to the name “Yosemite National Park” – to lead the National Park Service.
The nomination of an outsider with business ties to the agency he’d oversee comes at a pivotal moment for the service, which lost a quarter of its staff under Doge’s civil sector purge and which has been the subject of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to erase mention of historical events from NPS sites that portray Americans in an unfavorable light, such as slavery.
A campaign of ethnic cleansing and ‘tectonic’ new legal measures are killing the two-state solution to which other governments pay lip service
Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
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The Trump administration has revoked the bedrock scientific determination that gives the government the ability to regulate climate-heating pollution. The move was described as a gift to “billionaire polluters” at the expense of Americans’ health.
The endangerment finding, which states that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare, has since 2009 allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit heat-trapping pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.
Leaders promise to fight back with court challenges as Trump rescinds finding foundational to US climate rules
Climate leaders gathered outside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters on Wednesday to condemn the Trump administration’s plans to repeal the legal finding underpinning all federal climate regulations, and promised to fight against the rollback.
“This is corruption, plain and simple. Old-fashioned, dirty political corruption,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, senator for Rhode Island, at the rally. “This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters.”
Polymarket and Kalshi are less regulated than betting sites, but users can win or lose large sums on the platforms
Yadin Eldar, 21, has been betting on prediction markets since 2019. His friends think he’s “crazy”, he said. But the craze surrounding these platforms is rapidly gathering steam.
Users can bet on virtually anything, from the outcome of Sunday’s Super Bowl to whether the US will invade Greenland, every second of every day.
Over the last 10 years, the terms of political debate have changed completely – and week by week they seem to get worse
The notion of virtue-signalling – the act of performing progressive stances that don’t cost you anything in order to burnish your own moral credentials – has been around since at least the 00s. Ina political sense, it meant always being the one who reminded others to say “chairperson” not “chairman”; always manning the barricades for signs of bigotry, always being on the right demo. If its values were sound – all we’re talking about, really, is trying to systematise courtesy to others – it was often easy to lampoon, because it felt performative and had a hair-trigger.
But what has risen in its wake – vice-signalling – cannot be seen as its mirror or answer, any more than dehumanisation could be seen as the equal and opposite of decency. They’re not in the same rhetorical category. The term doesn’t bring itself to life; for that you need the US president. Cast your mind back to 2015; although Donald Trump had said he might run for election to the highest office in every cycle this century, his speech in Trump Tower was his first campaign launch, and it was where he announced that he would build a wall between the US and Mexico. In seemingly unplanned remarks – the grammar was off, the structure meandered, the vocabulary was vague and repetitive – he said “[Mexico] are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”
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