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US senator says that project, a key part of Trump’s voting restrictions, is ‘perilously rushed and potentially unlawful’
A new system to screen millions of mail-in ballots for this November’s US midterm elections was thrown together so hastily, and tested so little, that a single scanning glitch could see entire batches of ballots turned away, a whistleblower has told Congress.
The project – a key part of Donald Trump’s new restrictions on voting – is “perilously rushed and potentially unlawful”, according to the US senator Richard Blumenthal, who disclosed the warning in a letter to David Steiner, the postmaster general, on Tuesday.
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© Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock
This weekend, Rodrigo raised millions for charities that benefit women and girls, and she has previously been vocal about Gaza and Ice. With free speech increasingly under threat, her peers should take note
Donald Trump, the 80-year-old president of the United States, spent his weekend whining about a lake and posting memes of Donald’s Ducks. While he was busy with his ducks, Olivia Rodrigo, a 23-year-old pop star, spent her weekend trying to Make America Somewhat Decent Again. On Saturday, Rodrigo hosted the inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival, bringing together female artists to raise money for women-focused non-profits which have had their funding slashed by the Trump administration. The festival raised $10m (£7.4m) which Melinda French Gates matched, bringing the total to $20m.
In a perfect world a singer holding a benefit concert for feminist charities wouldn’t be radical stuff. But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? We live in hell. Trump has successfully bullied US institutions into doing his bidding. Universities have defunded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes, many media outlets have kowtowed to the US’s self-styled king and tech CEOs have jumped into bed with him. Women’s rights are going backwards globally and our civil liberties are under attack.
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© Photograph: Christopher Polk/Billboard/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christopher Polk/Billboard/Getty Images
© Photograph: Christopher Polk/Billboard/Getty Images
Navigating app surpasses Google and Apple Maps on top-downloaded US chart after posting ‘we’re not changing it’
A pioneering online mapping app that defied Donald Trump by refusing to rename Lake Ontario has become the most in-demand navigation tool in the US.
MapQuest, which was openly dismissive of the president’s 27 August executive order directing federal agencies to refer to the smallest of the Great Lakes as “Lake America” amid a trade spat with Canada, leapfrogged rivals Google Maps and Apple Maps to top the most-downloaded list, as first reported by TechCrunch.
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© Photograph: MapQuest
© Photograph: MapQuest
© Photograph: MapQuest
Comments signal president prepared to use dispute to push UK to raise defence spending and Nato contributions
Donald Trump has suggested he is reconsidering US support for Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, in a move likely to strain the “special relationship” between Washington and London.
“I always review every position – that’s just one of many,” the US president told reporters in the White House, in response to a question about whether he was reviewing the US’s position over the South Atlantic islands, an archipelago whose status has long been disputed by Argentina, which claims sovereignty.
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© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Pool/Annabelle Gordon - Pool/CNP/Shutterstock
Navigating app surpasses Google and Apple Maps on top-downloaded US chart after posting ‘we’re not changing it’
A pioneering online mapping app that defied Donald Trump by refusing to rename Lake Ontario has become the most in-demand navigation tool in the US.
MapQuest, which was openly dismissive of the president’s 27 August executive order directing federal agencies to refer to the smallest of the Great Lakes as “Lake America” amid a trade spat with Canada, leapfrogged rivals Google Maps and Apple Maps to top the most-downloaded list, as first reported by TechCrunch.
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© Photograph: MapQuest
© Photograph: MapQuest
© Photograph: MapQuest
Claims that Trump and Rubio are trying to influence result have parallels with CIA intervention 64 years ago
The year was 1962 and the Kennedy administration was desperate to swing Brazil’s congressional elections against its leftwing president, João Goulart, as a way of countering the supposed communist threat sweeping a region the US considered its back yard.
Historians say that in the lead-up to the vote, the CIA and the Department of State secretly channelled millions of dollars to opposition candidates and a group tasked with spreading rightwing propaganda and stirring up unrest.
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© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
Claims that Trump and Rubio are trying to influence result have parallels with CIA intervention 64 years ago
The year was 1962 and the Kennedy administration was desperate to swing Brazil’s congressional elections against its leftwing president, João Goulart, as a way of countering the supposed communist threat sweeping a region the US considered its back yard.
Historians say that in the lead-up to the vote, the CIA and the Department of State secretly channelled millions of dollars to opposition candidates and a group tasked with spreading rightwing propaganda and stirring up unrest.
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© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
© Photograph: Bruna Prado/AP
Questions over Trump’s ballroom and other structures might not feel urgent. But when his reign ends, Trumpism must be repudiated
On Monday, a majority on the supreme court found a technical way to overrule a lower court’s imperative to stop work, while not taking a stance on whether the whole enterprise might be illegal to begin with. Preservationists, the majority held, appear to lack legal grounds for filing a suit blocking Trump’s ballroom; that means construction will proceed, even if none other than John Roberts, in a dissent, held that “those responsible” were breaking the rules in deciding “what to build up at the People’s House”. The solicitor general, John Sauer, is on record claiming that 65% of the project is completed (of course, he might have exaggerated – such things are known to have happened in Trump administrations). Either way, it is thus likely that there will be a massive structure next to the original White House; and, given that the ruling will embolden the president dramatically to change Washington DC’s landscape by spending money never approved by Congress, we might be cursed with a triumphal arch as well. All of which raises the question: what to do with a monstrous architectural legacy in post-Trump America?
Some might dismiss the question as a bit of a luxury problem. After all, a war that also demonstrates the ongoing disempowerment of Congress keeps dragging on; ICE continues its cruel day-to-day work; Trump is trying every tactic to make the midterms go his way. But the built environment, and especially the civic landscape of a capital, is never just an afterthought. Buildings and monuments make values visible, as the philosopher Susan Neiman once put it. And the decision to leave Trump’s structures in place as if his reign had just been another normal era in US history is not neutral – just like leaving Confederate monuments in place is not neutral.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
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© Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
© Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
© Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Rollback of ‘roadless rule’ expected to benefit companies US Forest Service chief, Tom Schultz, previously lobbied for
Donald Trump this month announced plans to rescind a landmark rule that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years. If finalized, the rollback is expected to benefit the companies that Tom Schultz, chief of the US Forest Service, represented in his previous roles as a timber industry lobbyist and executive, according to research by consumer advocacy non-profit Public Citizen.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, more commonly known as the “roadless rule”, was adopted in 2001 to limit development in roughly 45m acres of national forest. Industry interests and Republican representatives have long lobbied for the rule’s rescission, which would open up those swaths of untouched land to road construction, drilling and logging.
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© Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
© Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
© Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
American Scoundrel tells story of McCarthy attack dog, mob lawyer and Trump mentor – will the president be thumbing its pages?
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”.
“I told my publicist to reach out to any of the Fox News hosts and reporters, to Joe Rogan, Steve Bannon,” Bird said. “We haven’t gotten a peep, other than Joe Rogan. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised. This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.”
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© Photograph: Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
PM Mark Carney responds to US officials who blame Canada for trade war; Jamieson Greer says trade tension with Canada is ‘more their emergency than ours’
Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is introducing a bill that would reverse Donald Trump’s most recent tariffs, among them the new 50% duty on Canadian goods, MS Now reported.
While the Senate minority leader’s proposed legislation has virtually no chance of becoming law, Schumer hopes that his proposal shows that Democrats are actively fighting the affordability crisis. Schumer first shared his proposed legislation with MS Now.
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© Photograph: Canadian Press/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Canadian Press/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Canadian Press/Shutterstock
© Kenny Holston/The New York Times
© Vyacheslav Oseledko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Sam Wolfe/Reuters
© Illustration by Ben Denzer; images by Michael Lee/Getty and Paul Denzer
© Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
The non-profit Leaving Maga is built on the premise that abandoning the Trump-built movement is like fighting a disease or breaking an addiction
Stephania Messina kept birthing boys. In the Quiverfull conservative Christian church she belonged to outside Detroit, Michigan, that made her a community celebrity. Your quiver, as the church taught it, is your womb, meant to be filled with as many arrows – a metaphor for children – as you can shoot unto the Lord. She shot five. “They treated me like I was Mother Mary, like I was this gift to the church,” she said.
But while she was quickly pushed into leading worship and Bible study groups for women and children, she wasn’t permitted to talk about politics.
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© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
© Photo Illustration by Alma Haser for The New York Times
© Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
© Kenny Holston/The New York Times
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