Closing summary
This brings our live coverage to an end for the day but we will be back to continue chronicling the second Trump administration on Friday. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking $20m in damages, alleging he was falsely imprisoned
A US district judge issued an injunction blocking Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying a nationwide class of plaintiffs
Police in Scotland are bracing for protests against Trump before an expected visit later this month to his immigrant mother’s homeland, where he is spectacularly unpopular.
The US state department has announced that it plans to move forward with mass layoffs as part of the most significant restructuring of the country’s diplomatic corps in decades.
Senator Ruben Gallego introduced a one-page bill to codify into law the Federal Trade Commission’s “click to cancel” rule, one day after a federal appeals court blocked the rule.
Federal immigration officers, supported by national guard troops, used force against protesters, firing chemical munitions, during raids on two cannabis farms in California’s central coast area.
Trump nominated a far-right influencer to serve as US ambassador to Malaysia.
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Trump nominates far-right troll to serve as US ambassador to Malaysia
Donald Trump said on Thursday that he intends to nominate Nick Adams, a far-right immigrant from Australia, known for his belligerent social media posts, to serve as US ambassador to Malaysia.
The nomination of an internet troll known for advising men to be “alpha males” echoes Trump’s decision during his first term to dispatch the spectacularly undiplomatic operative Ric Grenell to serve as US ambassador to Germany. In 2018, Grenell immediately got to work as Trump’s representative by offending the German people with a tweet.
Following the news of Trump’s decision, first revealed on X by Adams himself, examples of his more extreme posts began to circulate on the platform.
“Unfortunately today it’s more important to be a minority than it is to be a qualified person,” Adams said in one clip. “The most persecuted group in the United States of America are straight, white, Christian men.”
In another, he made a show of boycotting the supposedly woke business of Pizza Hut, which he accused of spreading “drag queen propaganda” by screaming at the camera and then driving a golf cart over a pizza box.
MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:
— Nick Adams (@NickAdamsinUSA) March 6, 2023
I don't care how many pizzas you send me!
Pizza Hut's woke sausage stuffed cheesy crust pizza will NEVER pass my lips again.
The boycott stands! pic.twitter.com/DKRj0KBAZM
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Newsom condemns scenes of despair caught on video during raid in California
Writing on the social media platform X, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, shared video of children fleeing from chemical agents fired by federal agents at protesters on Thursday during an immigration raid in Camarillo.
“Kids running from tear gas, crying on the phone because their mother was just taken from the fields,” Newson commented on the images. “Trump calls me ‘Newscum’ – but he’s the real scum.”
Kids running from tear gas, crying on the phone because their mother was just taken from the fields.
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) July 11, 2025
Trump calls me “Newscum” — but he’s the real scum. pic.twitter.com/fj0l25mRBN
The video appears to have been first posted on Instagram by Travis Keller, the founder of the record label Buddyhead, with the caption: “ICE tear gassing little kids currently in Camarillo, CA.”
Later in the video clip, the person recording can be heard asking a crying young man if the agents took his mother, to which he nods yes.
It is difficult to determine from the video evidence whether the chemical agents lobbed at the protesters in Camarillo included tear gas, but protesters were clearly struggling to breathe after exposure.
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Trump imposes new 35% tariff on goods from Canada
In the latest in a flurry of diktats sent to world leaders announcing new import tariffs, Donald Trump posted a letter on social media on Thursday addressed to Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, informing him that the US “will charge Canada a tariffs of 35%” starting on 1 August, “separate from all Sectoral Tariffs”.
In March, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on cars and auto parts imported from Canada. In June, he announced a 50% tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum imports. The new rates apply to all other goods.
Trump’s letter repeats his mistaken but frequently reiterated belief that tariffs are paid by foreign countries or businesses. In fact, tariffs are an import tax, paid by US importers, and often passed on to US consumers.
The new tariff rates set by Trump this week could all be reduced to zero if the administration loses its appeal later this month of an adverse ruling by the US court of international trade, which found in May that the president had acted beyond his legal authority by using emergency powers to impose tariffs in the absence of an actual emergency.
That hearing at the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington is scheduled for 10 am on 31 July.
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Trump threatens to oppose any Republican who votes against defunding NPR and PBS
In a post on his social media platform, Donald Trump threatened to withhold his support from any Republican in Congress who does not vote to strip away previously appropriated funds to support non-partisan public broadcasting.
Clearly laying out his vision that it is the role of the legislative branch to obey his orders, Trump wrote that it is very important for Republicans to “adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR)”.
“Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” the president of the United States instructed members of the co-equal branch he regards as subordinates.
The legislation is the first request by the Trump administration for Congress to claw back money it already has approved through annual spending bills. The bill reflects a list of cuts totaling $9.4bn that were requested by the office of management and budget. The bulk of the cuts – $8.3bn billion – are to foreign aid programs addressing global public health, international disaster assistance and hunger relief. The package also strips away all the funds for fiscal years 2026 and 2027 for public broadcasting, totaling $1.1bn.
The Senate is expected to vote on the rescission legislation, which passed the House by two votes, by next week.
Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, have both expressed qualms about eliminating public broadcasting from rural communities in their states.
Rounds, who is up for re-election in 2026, told CNN on Tuesday yesterday that he wants to protect “the radio stations in some of the rural areas that provide emergency services”.
Murkowski told reporters on Wednesday: “I don’t like the rescissions package as it is currently drafted. I’m a strong supporter of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and I think our global health programs are important.” At an appropriations committee hearing on Thursday, in which she voted with Democrats to stop the White House from using money budgeted for a new FBI headquarters in Maryland to move the agency somewhere else, Murkowski said she was opposed to rescissions in general.
In May, Trump issued an executive order claiming that PBS and NPR “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’”.
Together the two broadcasters reach tens of millions of Americans, providing them with fact-based news and educational information at a time when the administration favors partisan outlets and produces deeply political, and often misleading or false, social media content.
Although NPR’s political reporting is rigorously non-partisan, its adherence to factual accuracy apparently alienated the Trump campaign last year to such an extent that its correspondent, Franco Ordoñez, was denied credentials to at least one Trump news conference.
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Federal officers use force on protesters during immigration raids at California farms
Federal immigration officers, supported by national guard troops, used force against protesters, firing chemical munitions, during raids on two cannabis farms in California’s central coast area on Thursday, according to local news outlets and video posted on Instagram by immigrant-rights activists.
At a farm in Carpinteria, Salud Carbajal, a Democratic representative, was denied entry to the area by federal agents, a scene captured on video by the Santa Barbara Independent.
Congressman Salud Carbajal was denied access during a Homeland Security operation in Carpinteria. A very large crowd gathered at Foothill and Casitas Pass Road for about two hours. 10 people were reportedly taken away from a nearby cannabis farm. pic.twitter.com/wOFiQT7ZIc
— John Palminteri (@JohnPalminteri) July 10, 2025
“ICE was conducting a raid using disproportionate displays of force against local farm workers and our agricultural community,” Carbajal said in a statement after the incident. “As a member of Congress and representative of the Central Coast, I have the right to conduct oversight and see first-hand what ICE was doing here. As soon as I walked up, I was denied entry and was not allowed to pass. This was completely unacceptable.”
“And let me be clear,” Carbajal added, “these militarized ICE raids are not how you keep our communities safe. This kind of chaos only traumatizes families and tears communities apart. They are also a gross misuse of limited resources and a betrayal of the values that define us as Americans.”
Two members of the Carpinteria city council, Julia Mayer and Mónica Solórzano, were also present, they told the Santa Barbara Independent. As the officers pushed the crowd back, they threw a smoke grenade, causing Solórzano to fall and injure her right arm, she said.
“They were pushing toward each of us and we were standing,” Solórzano said. “They pushed us as a group into the ground.”
“It was loud,” Mayer said. “We were just trying to be out here to support our communities.”
Activists with 805 Immigrant Coalition sent out text alerts calling on community members to protect the workers and confronted the officers.
The face-off with the federal officers was documented on Instagram by another group, VC Defensa, which describes itself as “a coalition of local organizations dedicated to protecting the immigrant and refugee population of Ventura County”.
Carpinteria’s city council scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss the city’s response to the raids at 6pm local time on Thursday.
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Arizona Democrat moves to codify 'click-to-cancel' rule into law
The senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, just introduced a one-page bill to codify into law the Federal Trade Commission’s “click to cancel” rule, to force companies to make it easy for consumers to cancel subscriptions, one day after a federal appeals court blocked the rule from going into effect.
During his successful 2024 campaign for the senate, Gallego hosted Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s FTC chair who devised the rule.
On Thursday morning, the Arizona senator shared a social media post by Khan, in which she explained how the rule had been blocked by industry pressure.
“Firms have been making people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription, trapping Americans in needless bureaucracy and wasting their time & money,” she wrote.
The FTC, Khan explained, “began writing a ‘click-to-cancel’ rule promoting efficient cancellation, a rulemaking process that took 3+ years and required reviewing 16k comments & giving industry a chance to present their views at an FTC hearing”.
“Big business interests sued to block the ‘click-to-cancel’ rule – and Republican-appointed judges tossed it out, concluding that industry needed MORE time and process to explain why they opposed the rule,” Khan added.
“Too many companies are relying on shady fine print and confusing cancellation processes to lock customers into charges they never agreed to. They’re counting on customers to forget, give up, or get stuck in the fine print so they can keep charging their card every month,” Gallego said in a statement on his proposed legislation.
“This bill puts an end to that scam by giving the FTC’s Click-to-Cancel rule the full force of law so that people can cancel subscriptions just as easily as they sign up for them. It’s a commonsense fix that will save families money and stop businesses from trapping customers in subscriptions they don’t want, can’t use, or never meant to keep,” the senator added.
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State department plans mass layoffs with cuts to nearly 1,800 staff
The US state department has announced that it plans to move forward with mass layoffs as part of the most significant restructuring of the country’s diplomatic corps in decades. Officials say the cuts will align their mission with Donald Trump’s vision of America first.
The layoffs, which are commonly called reductions in force (or RIFs), along with voluntary redundancies, will affect nearly 15% of the state department’s domestic staff. A senior state department official said that was close to 1,800 people. The restructuring will also see several hundred bureaus merged or eliminated entirely. The department advises the president and leads the US in foreign policy issues.
The state department went forward with the layoffs, which were long expected, after the supreme court sided this week with the Trump administration against a federal judge’s hold on plans for mass government firings that could affect hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
“In the coming days, the department will be communicating to individuals affected by the reduction in force. First and foremost, we want to thank them for their dedication and service to the United States,” read a memo attributed to Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary for management and resources, announcing the layoffs.
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Murkowski sides with Democrats to block Trump from changing site of new FBI headquarters
The Senate appropriations committee narrowly voted to adopt an amendment on Thursday that blocks the Trump administration from changing the site of a new FBI headquarters building.
Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, cast the deciding vote on the amendment introduced by Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, which bars the Trump administration from spending any of the previously appropriated $1.4bn in funds to move the FBI anywhere but the site in Greenbelt, Maryland, which was chosen in a competitive process.
Last week, the administration notified Congress that it intended to permanently relocate the FBI to the Ronald Reagan building in Washington DC instead of proceeding with the planned building in suburban Maryland.
Such an “unauthorized use of funds”, Van Hollen said in a statement, would have been “directly at odds with what has been passed by the Congress on a bipartisan basis” and would have set “a dangerous precedent for executive overreach into Congress’s power of the purse”.
The measure passed 15-14.
In her comments before the vote, Murkowski said that she had no information on how the administration had determined that the Reagan building was a secure enough location.
“I, for one, would like to know,” Murkowski said, “this is the right place and it’s the right place, not for a Trump administration, not for a Biden administration, not for a Jon Ossoff administration, but this is the right place for the FBI.”
Murkowski paused after her reference to the possibility that the Democratic senator from Georgia could be the next president.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to start any rumors,” she added to laughter from her colleagues.
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Scotland braces for protests against Trump before rumored visit
Keir Starmer, the UK’s prime minister, has reportedly accepted an invitation to visit Donald Trump during the US president’s expected trip to Scotland this month, a source familiar with the plans told Reuters on Thursday.
There is, as yet, no word on the details of the rumored visit to the homeland of Trump’s mother, but Severin Carrell, the Guardian’s Scotland editor, reports that police in Scotland are gearing up for a possible visit to his golf resort in Aberdeenshire:
“It is thought Trump will officially open a new 18-hole golf course at his resort on the North Sea coast at Menie, north of Aberdeen, being named in honour of his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump,” Severin reported on Wednesday.
“Planning is under way for a potential visit to Scotland later this month by the president of the United States,” assistant chief constable Emma Bond said. Police are bracing for likely large-scale protests, given Trump’s deep unpopularity in his mother’s homeland. There were demonstrations in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen during Trump’s last official visit as president in 2018.
That year, Trump was greeted at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland by a Greenpeace activist who paraglided directly over his head trailing a banner that read: “Trump: Well Below Par.” The scene was captured on video by the activist group and journalists.
Donald Trump's arrival with the First Lady at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland has been met with a protest from the air. A Greenpeace paraglider propelled past him with a banner saying 'Trump well below par' - it was in protest at his stance on green issues. Watch video here pic.twitter.com/xvhLByfnYo
— Zora Suleman (@ZoraSuleman) July 14, 2018
Trump’s first visit to Scotland as a politician came the morning after the UK voted to leave the European Union. He hailed the result that morning, despite the fact that Brexit was opposed by nearly two-thirds of Scottish voters.
Trump, whose mother was from a remote part of Scotland (the Western Isles, where 55% of voters opposed leaving the EU), seemed oblivious to nationalist sentiment there that day, telling reporters the vote meant: “Basically, they took back their country.”
During his first official state visit to the UK as president in 2018, Trump started to claim, falsely, that his 2016 visit had been “the day before” the Brexit referendum, not the day after it, and took credit for having “predicted” the outcome. Trump’s obviously false claim about the date of a foreign visit baffled reporters who accompanied him on the trip.
In an Oval Office meeting with Ireland’s leader in 2019, as Brexit negotiations stalled, in part over the issue of the Irish border with the North of Ireland, Trump again repeated his fictional account of having visited Scotland before the Brexit vote, claiming that he had “predicted it” at a news conference at one of his golf courses in Scotland, which actually took place the day after the vote.
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Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley, announced on Thursday that he is running for re-election next year, citing the threat posed by “Donald Trump and his Maga cronies”.
Merkley, a liberal Democrat, will turn 70 before election day in 2026, and his decision to run for a fourth term will not please party activists who are concerned that there are too many older Democrats in Congress. He was first elected to the senate in 2008.
Oregon’s senior senator, Democrat Ron Wyden, who is 76, was elected to a fifth term in 2022.
In an interview with the Washington Post in 2023, Merkley said that while he did not support calls for a mandatory retirement age for senators: “I do say to my team, when I am at that point, that pivot in my life, where you start to see the changes in my abilities, don’t let me run for re-election.”
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Summary
The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil filed a claim against the Trump administration seeking $20m in damages, alleging he was falsely imprisoned. The suit comes as Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime, is out on bail and the administration continues to actively seek his removal from the US. The Thursday filing is a precusor to a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act. “They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable. Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked,” Khalil said in a statement.
Here’s what’s also happened so far today:
A US district judge issued an injunction blocking Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying a nationwide class of plaintiffs
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, pushed back against new evidence from a whistleblower suggesting Department of Justice lawyers were instructed to ignore court orders.
US senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Kristi Noem was responsible for deaths related to flooding in Texas.
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Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, announced on Thursday they were getting divorced.
The Texas radio station KUT obtained the petition for divorce filed in Collin county. The petition accuses the attorney general of adultery and says the couple hasn’t lived together since June 2024.
Ken Paxton, who is running for US Senate, said on X:
After facing the pressures of countless political attacks and public scrutiny, Angela and I have decided to start a new chapter in our lives. I could not be any more proud or grateful for the incredible family that God has blessed us with, and I remain committed to supporting our amazing children and grandchildren. I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time.
Angela Paxton said on X:
Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds. I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage. I move forward with complete confidence that God is always working everything together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.
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The fossil fuel industry poured more than $19m into Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, accounting for nearly 8% of all donations it raised, a new analysis shows, raising concerns about White House’s relationship with big oil.
The president raised a stunning $239m for his inauguration – more than the previous three inaugural committees took in combined and more than double the previous record – according to data published by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC). The oil and gas sector made a significant contribution to that overall number, found the international environmental and human rights organization Global Witness.
The group pulled itemized inaugural fund contribution data released by the FEC in April, and researched each contributor with the help of an in-house artificial intelligence tool. It located 47 contributions to the fund made by companies and individuals linked to the fossil fuel sector, to which Trump has voiced his fealty.
Six Secret Service agents have been suspended without pay after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally last July.
The suspensions range from 10 to 42 days, with a loss of both salary and benefits during the absence, the agency’s deputy director, Matt Quinn, told CBS News.
The disciplinary action comes nearly a year after the 13 July 2024 shooting at the Butler farm show grounds, where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired multiple rounds from an unsecured rooftop, grazing Trump’s ear and killing firefighter Corey Comperatore.
Quinn defended the agency’s decision not to dismiss the agents outright, telling CBS News the service would not “fire our way out of this” crisis.
“We’re going to focus on the root cause and fix the deficiencies that put us in that situation,” he said, adding that suspended personnel would return to reduced operational roles.
In an emailed statement, Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, called Khalil’s claim “absurd,” accusing him of “hateful behavior and rhetoric” that threatened Jewish students.
The state department said its actions toward Khalil were fully supported by the law.
Khalil says he filed claim 'because they think they are untouchable'
Mahmoud Khalil said in a statement that he wanted to send a message that he won’t be intimidated into silence. In lieu of a settlement, Khalil suggested he would accept an official apology and changes to the administration’s deportation policies.
He said of the Trump administration: “They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable. Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked.”
Khalil is planning to share any settlement money with others targeted by officials over pro-Palestinian protests.
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The AP has more on the filing. It says the Trump administration smeared Mahmoud Khalil as an antisemite while it sought to deport him over his prominent role in campus protests.
The filing — a precursor to a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act — names the Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the state department.
It comes as the deportation case against Khalil, a 30-year-old recent graduate student at Columbia University, continues to wind its way through the immigration court system.
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil seeks $20m in damages from Trump administration
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose role in college campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza led to his detention for over three months in immigration jail, is now seeking $20m in damages from the Trump administration.
His lawyers filed a claim Thursday, alleging false imprisonment and malicious prosecution after his March arrest by federal agents. Khalil, a legal US resident, said he suffered severe anguish in jail, and continues to fear for his safety. The government has accused him of leading protests aligned with Hamas, but has not provided any evidence of a link to the terror group.
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Citing the CNN report about bureaucratic hurdles at Fema, US senator Ron Wyden said homeland security secretary Kristi Noem was responsible for deaths related to the flooding.
“Kids in Texas died as a direct result of Kristi Noem’s negligence. She should be removed from office before her incompetence gets Oregonians killed in a wildfire,” Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, posted on the social media network Bluesky.
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New cost-cutting measures at FEMA may have slowed the agency’s response to the Texas floods, CNN reported on Thursday.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.
For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.
In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.
“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”
For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.
In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.
But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.
Read the full story here.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, is pushing back amid new disclosures from a fired DoJ lawyer suggesting justice department attorneys were instructed to defy court orders.
“We support legitimate whistleblowers, but this disgruntled employee is not a whistleblower – he’s a leaker asserting false claims seeking five minutes of fame, conveniently timed just before a confirmation hearing and a committee vote,” she wrote in a post on X. “As Mr. Bove testified and as the Department has made clear, there was no court order to defy, as we successfully argued to the DC Circuit when seeking a stay, when they stayed Judge Boasberg’s lawless order.”
“And no one was ever asked to defy a court order. This is another instance of misinformation being spread to serve a narrative that does not align with the facts. This “whistleblower” signed 3 briefs defending DOJ’s position in this matter and his subsequent revisionist account arose only after he was fired because he violated his ethical duties to the department.”
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As temperatures soared on a sweltering July day in New York City, shoppers at Queens’s largest mall said they were feeling the heat – of rising prices.
“T-shirts, basic t-shirts, underwear, the basic necessities – the prices are going up,” said Clarence Johnson, 48, who was visiting the Macy’s at the Queen Center mall to pick up shirts he ordered online.
As Donald Trump presses on with his trade wars, retailers have been passing price increases onto customers. Department stores – which rely on a variety of imported goods and materials, from shoes to t-shirts – have particularly been scrambling to deal with the flux in prices.
At Macy’s, signs advertising sales of as much as 60% off original prices were sprinkled around the store – even next to diamond-encrusted necklaces locked inside display cases in the jewelry department. But for some customers, the prices are still too high.
The future of the US government’s premier climate crisis report is perilously uncertain after the Trump administration deleted the website that housed the periodic, legally mandated assessments that have been produced by scientists over the past two decades.
Five national climate assessments have been compiled since 2000 by researchers across a dozen US government agencies and outside scientists, providing a gold standard report to city and state officials, as well as the general public, of global heating and its impacts upon human health, agriculture, water supplies, air pollution and other aspects of American life.
But although the assessments are mandated to occur every four years under legislation passed by Congress in 1990, the Trump administration has axed the online portal holding the reports, which went dark last week. A contract to support this work has also been torn up and researchers who were working on the next report, due around 2027, have been dismissed.
A copy of the latest assessment, conducted in 2023, can be found deep on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website. The Guardian replicated the report here in full in a more visible way for the public to access.
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Donald Trump has appointed his transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, as interim administrator of Nasa, six weeks after withdrawing the nomination of Elon Musk ally and billionaire Jared Isaacman for the permanent role.
The president announced the appointment on Truth Social on Wednesday evening, praising Duffy’s work on transportation infrastructure and describing him as someone who will be “a fantastic leader of the ever more important space agency, even if only for a short period of time”.
Duffy, who will maintain his cabinet position while taking on Nasa duties, wrote on X: “Honored to accept this mission. Time to take over space. Let’s launch.”
The day so far
A federal judge in New Hampshire blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying the case as a nationwide class action. The decision from US district judge Joseph Laplante comes after the US supreme court said federal judges could only issue nationwide injunctions if they certified plaintiffs as a nationwide class. The issue is expected to return to the US supreme court, which has not yet decided on the constitutionality of Trump’s order.
Here’s what else is happening:
A justice department whistleblower turned over text messages and emails in support of his explosive claim that Emil Bove, a top department official, told lawyers they should be prepared to say “fuck you” and defy court orders.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio met with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov at the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur, where he said the US and Russia had exchanged new ideas for Ukraine peace talks
Some Planned Parenthood affiliates are alerting patients that they can no longer accept Medicaid for care Because of a provision in the GOP reconciliation bill that passed earlier this month.
Updated
At least two regional Planned Parenthood affiliates have notices on their websites telling patients that, thanks to a provision in Republicans’ new tax-and-spending bill that “defunds” the reproductive healthcare giant, they can no longer accept Medicaid.
However, this provision – which abortion rights supporters have called a “backdoor abortion ban” – was recently blocked by a court order. Other Planned Parenthood affiliates are continuing to treat patients who use Medicaid to pay for treatment.
Although the Planned Parenthood network is overseen by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, it includes dozens of independent affiliates that directly provide care to patients.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington DC and Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains had notices on their websites alerting patients that they can no longer accept Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, is taking on a conspiracy theory on Thursday about contrails – the white streaks that appear behind airplanes.
As CNN reported, there is a longstanding conspiracy theory that the streaks are actually chemicals sprayed by the US government to control the weather. The streaks are condensation trails, formed by water vapor that freezes around an aircraft’s exhaust.
“Americans have questions about geoengineering and contrails. They expect honesty and transparency from their government when seeking answers. For years, people who asked questions in good faith were dismissed, even vilified by the media and their own government. This ends today,” he posted on X.
The EPA announced it was launching a webpage explaining what contrails are. The page addresses the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory.
“It is a term some people use to inaccurately claim that contrails resulting from routine air traffic are actually an intentional release of dangerous chemicals or biological agents at high altitudes for a variety of nefarious purposes, including population control, mind control, or attempts to geoengineer Earth or modify the weather,” the page says.
The 14th amendment to the US constitution has long been understood to guarantee citizenship to any person born on US soil. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment says.
Trump has sought to overturn the longstanding interpretation of the law to say that a person can only be considered a US citizen if they have at least one parent who is a US citizen or a lawful permanent resident.
If the order were to take effect, it’s estimated that around 150,000 babies would be denied citizenship each year.
Judge's ruling comes after US supreme court ruling on nationwide injunctions
Laplante’s order is significant because it comes after the US supreme court ruled 6-3 that district court judges could not issue nationwide injunctions unless the plaintiffs in the case had been certified as a nationwide class. The court did not rule on the constitutionality of Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship.
The plaintiffs before Laplante had asked to be certified as a class representing all babies whose citizenship could be affected by Trump’s order, according to Reuters.
Laplante’s decision to certify the class and issue an injunction shows that there is a path forward for the lawsuits, which are likely to quickly return to the US supreme court, which will likely return to the issue to address the bigger underlying legal issues in the order.
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Judge blocks Trump on birthright citizenship
A federal judge in New Hampshire has again blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship and applied the injunction nationwide.
US district judge Joseph Laplante argued the plaintiffs could be represented as a class and blocked the executive order.
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“At this point why don’t we just submit an emoji of a middle finger as our filing,” Reuveni wrote in one text 19 March message. “A picayune middle finger.” “So stupid,” his boss wrote back. The messages provide an unusual and remarkable level of insight into how justice department lawyers knew they were defying court orders.
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One of the newly-disclosed emails shows that Bove gave the OK to deplane the flights, despite an order from US district judge James Boasberg to turn planes carrying detainees around. According to the email, Bove gave the legal advice that it was OK to deplane the detainees because the planes had left US airspace before Boasberg’s written order had been filed on the court docket. Prior to issuing his written order, Boasberg had issued an oral order from the bench.
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During a hearing before the senate judiciary committee last month, Emil Bove denied that he had ever instructed justice department attorneys to defy a court order.
“I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order,” he said.
The messages released by Erez Reuveni suggest that DoJ lawyers were, at the very least, aware of the possibility they might have to ignore judicial orders.
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You can read the trove of documents Erez Reuveni turned over to the senate judiciary committee here.
DoJ whistleblower shares more texts alleging Emil Bove urged defiance of court orders
Erez Reuveni, a fired justice department attorney, has provided text messages to the Senate judiciary committee supporting his whistleblower complaint involving Emil Bove, a top department official who is currently being considered for a seat on the federal bench.
Reuveni’s initial complaint, filed last month, included the explosive allegation that Bove had told DoJ lawyers “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order” blocking efforts to remove immigrants to El Salvador.
The text messages Reuveni provided to the Senate judiciary committee include Reuveni and his boss, August Flentje, referencing Bove’s comments, according to Bloomberg Law.
“Guess we are about to say fuck you to the court”– “Super,” Reuveni texted Flentje.
Flentje replied: “Well Pamela Jo Bondi is”, and “Not you.”
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My colleagues Johana Bhuiyan and Nick Robins-Early have a great deep dive this morning on how Linda Yaccarino, the X CEO who stepped down this week, was set up to fail:
In May 2023, when Linda Yaccarino, an NBC advertising executive, joined what was then still known as Twitter, she was given a tall order: repair the company’s relationship with advertisers after a chaotic year of being owned by Elon Musk. But just weeks after she became CEO, Musk posted an antisemitic tweet that drove away major brands like Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate and Warner Bros Discovery to pause their advertising on the platform. Musk delivered an apology for the tweet later at a conference – which he called the worst post he’s ever done – but it came with a message to advertisers, specifically the Disney CEO Bob Iger: “Go fuck yourselves”. Yaccarino was in the audience of the conference.
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At the urging of the White House, Texas Republicans are planning to redraw their congressional map this year in order to try and hold on to GOP seats in the US House.
Congressional maps are usually redrawn at the start of each decade, after the decennial census, to account for population shifts. But Texas governor Greg Abbott announced on Wednesday that the state legislature would take up redrawing the maps in an upcoming special session. The announcement came after Donald Trump’s political team urged Texas to redraw the maps to try and pick up Republican seats.
Republicans already hold 25 of the state’s 38 congressional seats. In order to pick up more seats, they will likely have to move Republican voters out of safe GOP districts into Democratic ones. That could wind up backfiring by making those solidly Republican districts more competitive in years when Democrats do well.
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US secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the US and Russia had exchanged new ideas for Ukraine peace talks, according to the Associated Press.
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Rubio makes first trip to Asia as secretary of state as Trump escalates trade war
US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s visit to Kuala Lumpur marks the first time he has visited Asia since Donald Trump took office.
Rubio faces a bit of a difficult task as he meets with foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), Reuters reports. He must convince them that America is committed to the region while Trump is poised to impose tariffs on seven Asean countries.
“It is our view, our strong view, and the reality that this century and the next, the story of the next 50 years, will largely be written here in this region, in this part of the world,” Rubio said at the gathering of Asean ministers. “When I hear ... that perhaps the United States or the world might be distracted by events in other parts of the planet, I would say distraction is impossible.”
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The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation”, the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said.
“The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now.
“It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by burning fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added: “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.”
Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening, he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate.
He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph”.
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Rubio meets Russia's Lavrov in Malaysia
US secretary of state Marco Rubio met with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the Asean foreign ministers’ meeting in Malaysia on Thursday, as Russia intensifies its attacks on Ukraine.
It was their second in-person meeting, at a time when US president Donald Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Russian president Vladimir Putin as the war in Ukraine drags on.
Neither Lavrov nor Rubio made any comments to press at the start of the meeting.
Rubio met with Lavrov in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday evening, having already met with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations in his first trip to Asia since taking office.
Rubio and Lavrov first met in Saudi Arabia in February as part of Trump’s effort to re-establish relations and help negotiate an end to the war.
The counterparts also spoke by phone in May and June.
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The Trump administration this week pressed five African presidents to take in migrants from other countries when they are deported by the US, two officials familiar with the discussions told Reuters on Thursday.
The plan was presented to the presidents of Liberia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Gabon during their visit to the White House on Wednesday, according to a US and a Liberian official who both asked not to be named.
The White House and official spokespeople for the five nations did not respond to requests for comment. It was not immediately clear if any of the countries had agreed to the plan.
Since returning to office in January, Donald Trump has been pressing to speed up deportations, including by sending migrants to third countries when there are problems or delays over sending them to their home nations.
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Judge to weigh blocking Trump on birthright citizenship despite supreme court ruling
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next hour or so.
We start with news that a federal judge will consider today whether to prevent president Donald Trump’s administration from enforcing his executive order limiting birthright citizenship after the US supreme court restricted the ability of judges to block his policies using nationwide injunctions.
American Civil Liberties Union lawyers are set to ask US district judge Joseph Laplante at a hearing in Concord, New Hampshire, to grant class action status to a lawsuit they filed seeking to represent any babies whose citizenship status would be threatened by implementation of Trump’s directive.
Granting class status would empower Laplante, if he is inclined to do so, to issue a fresh judicial order blocking implementation of the Republican president’s policy nationally.
The ACLU and others filed the suit just hours after the supreme court on 27 June issued a 6-3 ruling, powered by its conservative majority, that narrowed three nationwide injunctions issued by judges in separate challenges to Trump’s directive. The suit was filed on behalf of non-US citizens living in the US whose babies might be affected.
Under the supreme court’s decision, Trump’s executive order would take effect on 27 July.
Looking to seize upon an exception in the supreme court’s ruling, the lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the decision allows judges to continue to block Trump policies on a nationwide basis in class action lawsuits.
In other developments:
Donald Trump released an intemperate letter to Brazil’s president imposing a 50% tariff and complaining about the prosecution of his friend, former president Jair Bolsonaro, for the crime of trying to stay in office despite losing an election and then inciting a riot by his supporters to derail the transfer of power.
Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rejected Trump’s demand that the charges against Bolsonaro be dropped, and pointed out that Brazil has an independent judiciary and does not, in fact, have a trade imbalance with the US.
Brazilians mocked Bolsonaro’s potential successor for supporting Trump, by remixing video of him in a Maga hat on social media.
Amid concerns that a wave of staff reductions threaten the core missions of Nasa, Trump announced that he is asking the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, to also serve as interim administrator of the space agency.
Trump complimented the president of Liberia on his excellent English, revealing that he is unaware of that nation’s close ties to the US, as a colony founded in 1822 for free Black Americans.
The US supreme court maintained a judicial block on a Republican-crafted Florida law that makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants to enter the state.
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