Flight cancellations take effect amid government shutdown – US politics live

Russia urged the United States on Friday to clarify what it called contradictory signals about a resumption of nuclear testing, saying such a step would trigger responses from Russia and other countries.

President Donald Trump last week ordered the US military to immediately restart the process for testing nuclear weapons, Reuters reported. But he did not make clear if he meant flight-testing of nuclear-capable missiles or a resumption of tests involving nuclear explosions - something neither the US nor Russia has done for more than three decades.

“If it is the latter, then this will create negative dynamics and trigger steps from other states, including Russia, in response,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.

“For now, we note that the signals emanating from Washington, which are causing justified concern in all corners of the world, remain contradictory, and, of course, the real state of affairs must be clarified.”

Major airports across America’s east coast have reported some of the highest numbers of delayed flights amid the long-running government shutdown.

Fox Business reported that Newark, Washington DC and Boston have seen the most delays, closely followed by Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey recorded the highest number of flight delays this week among 28 major US airports, with 1,237 delays, followed by Chicago O’Hare at 1,196, according to FlightAware.

Overall, more than 14,900 flights across the U.S. have been delayed this week, and over 450 have been canceled, FlightAware reported.

Southwest and United are the airlines facing the most delays, Fox Business reported.

The US Senate on Thursday blocked a Democratic war powers resolution that would have forced Donald Trump to seek congressional approval to launch strikes in Venezuela, allowing the president to remain unchecked in his ability to expand his military campaign against the country.

The 49-51 vote against passing the resolution, mostly along party lines, came a month after a previous effort to stop strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in international waters similarly failed, 48-51.

The new resolution narrowed its scope to attract Republicans, but senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski remained the only two Republicans to cross party lines to support the resolution. Susan Collins and Thom Tillis, who had expressed reservations about the strikes, voted against.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ramped up its military campaign against drug cartels – and to destabilize the Venezuelan government – deploying the United States’s most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, just days after Trump announced the US would next hit land-based targets.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump told reporters at the White House on 23 October. “We’re going to kill them, you know. They’re going to be, like, dead.”

The administration has also developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, according to two people familiar with the matter, and Trump’s aides have asked the justice department for additional guidance that could provide a legal basis to strike targets other than boats.

The supreme court on Thursday allowed Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy blocking transgender and non-binary people from choosing passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.

The decision by the high court’s conservative majority is Trump’s latest win on the high court’s emergency docket, and it means his administration can enforce the policy while a lawsuit over it plays out. It halts a lower-court order requiring the government to keep letting people choose male, female or X on their passport to line up with their gender identity on new or renewed passports.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, hailed the decision, saying in a post on X: “Today’s stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport. In other words: there are two sexes, and our attorneys will continue fighting for that simple truth.”

Meanwhile, the court’s three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calling the decision a “pointless but painful perversion”.

She added: “Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern. So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded. This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification.

“What the Government needs (and what it does not have) is an explanation for why it faces harm unless the President’s chosen policy is implemented now. It suggests that there is an urgent foreign policy interest in dictating sex markers on passports, but does not elaborate as to what that interest might possibly be,” Jackson wrote.

A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to find the money to fully fund food stamps for 42 million low-income Americans in November by Friday, in a rebuke to the government’s plan to only provide reduced aid during the shutdown.

US district judge John J McConnell Jr criticized the administration’s plan to partly fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits in November, saying it had failed to comply with an order he issued on Saturday requiring the government to ensure Americans received full or partial benefits no later than Wednesday.

He also said the administration plowed ahead with a plan to partly cover benefits without addressing – as required– the fact that in many states, it could take weeks or months to implement the reduced benefits.

“The evidence shows that people will go hungry, food pantries will be overburdened, and needless suffering will occur,” McConnell said. “That’s what irreparable harm here means.”

The judge added: “This should never happen in America.”

McConnell gave the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through Snap, though it is unlikely that the people who rely on it will see the money on the debit cards they use for groceries that quickly.

“The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund Snap,” McConnell said. “They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial Snap payments and failed to consider the harms individuals who rely on those benefits would suffer.”

This type of order is usually not subject to an appeal, but the Trump administration has challenged similar rulings before.

The plaintiffs want the Snap program, which is a major component of the nation’s social safety net and serves about one in eight Americans, to be fully funded. Some states, including New York, Oregon and Virginia, declared states of emergency last week to provide funds that would keep benefits available. But the amounts provided were expected to amount to a fraction of normal federal government funding. The federal costs of Snap amounts to about $8bn a month across the US.