America

WASHINGTON — For more than four hours, a ground stop of virtually all aircraft in the United States brought unprecedented chaos and delays that are expected to last days.

Here is what we know about what went wrong.

What caused the stop?

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said switches and routers on the Federal Aviation Administration’s analog air traffic control system became overloaded with data, causing inconsistencies in communication with airlines. As a result, the decision was made to shut the system down shortly after 12:30 p.m.

“We have old, old switches, old routers, we use 1980s little copper lines,” he said. “It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere.”

The ground stop ended around 5:15 p.m. Duffy said the FAA was able to deploy fixes to reduce the overloading and bring its towers and air traffic control facilities known as TRACONs back online.

Duffy said the problem was with the TDM — time-division multiplexing — a dated, still mostly copper-wire technology used to transmit air traffic control voice and radar data. He said there was no evidence to suggest a cyberattack or the involvement of foreign adversaries.

What problems did this cause?

The technological breakdown led to intermittent communication and radar, but not a complete blackout, Duffy said.

“We were able to keep some of those communications going, but when you have issues and you can’t immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at — that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate,” he said.

What do we know about the technology?

Duffy lambasted the aging infrastructure that the FAA relies on and said that President Trump is pushing for the funding needed to update the equipment.

“None of your networks run on 1980 technology,” he said to the gaggle of reporters at a Friday evening news conference. “You have all got fiber, state-of-the-art, high-speed networks that cover all of your stations, but not the FAA.”

He said the FAA was in the process of upgrading its air traffic control system thanks to $12.5 billion in funding secured through Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, but called on Congress to approve an additional $50 billion to complete the modernization of the system.

“I believe that should be a priority,” he said. “America, Congress, let’s make this system more safe.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin noted that the communications failure was caused as the FAA was performing upgrades.

“That new equipment, new technology — It was overwhelming the older system,” he said. “The patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system.”

What is the impact?

There were more than 3,500 airplanes flying across America when the decision to close the airspace was made, Duffy said.

Tens of thousands of travelers were left stranded and FEMA was mobilized to ensure lifesaving medication was not being missed by passengers, said Mullin. Some college football teams were left scrambling to find alternative transportation to this weekend’s games.

Duffy said that air traffic control would try to move as many planes as possible Friday night, but noted that this will depend on the availability of flight crews and pilots.

PARIS — Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized democracies began two days of talks in Paris on Monday as they grapple with multiple unresolved global crises amid questions about how President Trump will approach foreign policy after his Republican Party’s heavy losses in the midterm elections.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is likely to face questions about whether the administration will shift its positions on the Russia-Ukraine war, the Iran conflict, energy security and artificial intelligence. Those issues will dominate discussions among top diplomats from the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan on Monday and Tuesday.

It is Rubio’s first overseas trip since last week’s midterm elections that dealt Republicans severe losses and cost them control of Congress, partly because of deeply unpopular policies such as the Iran war. The talks also come amid major protests across Europe, including in the French capital.

U.S. politics likely to surface at allies’ meeting

Asked about allies wanting to know what comes next after the elections, Rubio told reporters that the countries he is meeting with this week understand American politics and “they, too, have experienced divisions in government and divisions in their own system.”

Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand, whose country has faced withering criticism and insults from Trump, said it remains an open question as to how Washington will proceed.

“In terms of the U.S. and its approach I will say that the president has executive powers,” she told reporters in Paris. “The House and the Senate have changed leadership so it’s very much a question of what the approach will be.”

Yet there has been little sign that the Democrats’ gains will affect Trump’s strategy, and his first major personnel decision has installed Stephen Miller, a hard-line supporter who has advocated extreme positions on both domestic and foreign policy, as chief of staff.

America’s top diplomat is seen by many as presenting a gentler side to Trump’s often brusque approach to both friends and foes, but there has been speculation — that he has denied — that he might choose to leave the administration early to prepare for a 2028 presidential run.

Wars in Iran and Ukraine will be major topics

Trump has floated the idea of a partnership with Europe to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end. The president’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are set to meet both Ukrainian and Russian officials in the United Arab Emirates starting Tuesday to discuss potential compromises.

Rubio said postwar security guarantees for Ukraine and the rest of Europe have been a top concern for allies.

“There’s been some advances made in what that architecture could look like post-conflict,” Rubio said. “Nothing’s been finalized yet, and maybe some progress can be made in Abu Dhabi.”

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who met separately with Rubio on Monday, said he welcomed the Abu Dhabi talks but stressed that Europe must be part of any resolution.

“I am still very grateful to the United States of America for making every effort to get the parties to the conflict to the table,” Wadephul said. “But I made clear again here that Europe belongs at this table. There can be no solution without Europe, only with Europe.”

Anand also said the Abu Dhabi discussions could yield results.

“I want to underline the importance of the talks,” she said. “It has been some months since the parties have met … and I would like to underscore the importance of this discussion in Abu Dhabi,” she said, adding that it would be critical to get “specific aspects” of a peace proposal clarified.

At the same time, Qatari and other mediators have proposed an interim solution to end the deadlock over the conflict with Iran that has sent fuel prices soaring amid instability in key shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

Rubio said the sides are not on “the verge of a breakthrough,” while reiterating that Trump prefers a diplomatic solution. But he noted of diplomacy that “right now, it hasn’t been very productive because the Iranian demands are simply not just unacceptable but, in some cases, outrageous and ridiculous and really not realistic.”

He said he expects allies to have a lot of questions about the conflict and next steps.

Uncertainty about consensus, even among allies

France has invited Brazil, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine to participate in some discussions. Its other priorities include Africa, China, Cuba and Haiti. The French Foreign Ministry said there will be a meeting on artificial intelligence and a separate session on support for Ukraine.

Shortly after arriving in Paris on Monday, Rubio posted on X that one of his priorities would be “pushing for real accountability at the U.N.” The comment suggested the administration would maintain its demands for reform at the United Nations. It has already withdrawn from several U.N. and other multilateral bodies.

Trump and his administration have unsettled America’s G7 partners over issues including support for Ukraine and NATO and opposition to the International Criminal Court. All G7 members except Japan, which has a separate treaty alliance with the U.S., belong to NATO.

The administration is pushing to dismantle the ICC, an international war crimes court to which all G7 members except the U.S. belong. It has imposed severe sanctions on the court and several of its employees, saying the ICC is trying to investigate Americans.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

“I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time.”

So said Senator-elect James Talarico in his victory speech on election night after he won the first United States Senate seat in Texas for the Democratic Party in almost 40 years.

I don’t like Talarico or his policies, but I agree with him on one thing: The American people are tired of being pitted against one another. We need more uniters and fewer dividers in the Republican Party and US politics in general.

This is the conclusion many American voters seem to have reached after 10 years of Donald Trump dominating the right.

A decade ago, he forcefully entered the political scene with a radically different approach and provocative rhetoric. He won his first US presidential election by attacking his opponents with clever and cutting nicknames. Crooked Hillary. Low-energy Jeb. Pocahontas. Little Marco. Crazy Bernie. Lying Ted.

All were aimed at diminishing his rivals in ways that only a rapturous crowd of adoring MAGA fans could really appreciate. His attacks played well on social media and reflected an American culture that was far less deferential to the political establishment, far coarser in its language and far more interested in being entertained than being informed.

Trump’s attacks, performed live at his raucous rallies, had all the earmarks of a professional wrestling bout. It was blood sport at its most basic level. And Trump’s supporters ate it up, loving how he stood up to an elite that obviously despised them.

His opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, called half of his supporters a “basket of deplorables”.

Seven years before Trump formally entered the race for the White House, Barack Obama in a speech in San Francisco had said that people like them “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.

Trump gathered up these angry voters, many of whom had protested during the Tea Party movement, and created “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). They loved the visceral way Trump communicated. They loved that he promised to end illegal immigration and free-trade policies that destroyed manufacturing jobs.

Trump’s rhetoric, coarse as it was, seemed honest, authentic, unscripted, and totally real, not poll-tested, not AI-generated, not written by expensive speechwriters. Trump was talking to them, not at them. He had listened to their fears and promised to fight back with a vengeance.

When Trump claimed the political establishment had stolen his re-election, he didn’t sit idly by, accepting the results. He consulted his lawyers, came up with a dubious legal strategy and then unleashed his supporters on Capitol Hill, hoping upon hope that their pressure would bend the hallowed traditions of presidential succession to his will. It didn’t work, but it also didn’t disqualify him.

Over the four years of President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump survived legal attacks, threats of imprisonment and assassination attempts to become an invincible force who seized power again in 2024. His ascent seemed like destiny.

But as it often does, the fickle winds of the electorate changed direction. They used to love his unconventional approach to politics, but now they wanted him to deliver on his promises to lower inflation and gas prices. He had once promised to keep us out of foreign wars, but that promise was broken, too. Perhaps he had a good reason to attack Iran, but he failed to make a convincing case to the American public, and voters quickly grew disenchanted with another broken promise. The vice president himself said that the war is what cost the Republicans the election. But it was more than just the war. Voters were tired of the whole act.

When Trump told his voters to imagine that he was on the ballot, it wasn’t just his supporters who made this election a referendum on Trump. So too did angry Democrats, disgusted independents and more than a few former MAGA minions.

They said this election was about affordability, but it really was about an undisciplined president who refused to colour inside the lines, who blundered into a costly war, who didn’t stop his administration from detaining and deporting high school baseball coaches and Uber drivers and domestic employees, and harboured too many white supremacists within his ranks.

He alienated women, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, African Americans and offended well-educated Midwesterners who couldn’t stomach his language or his antics any longer. The great MAGA coalition that he assembled for his historic 2024 victory dissipated in one election night, tired of the nonsense and wanting a change in direction.

Things are so bad for Republicans that they lost all kinds of members, from House leaders like Richard Hudson, to tremendously flawed MAGA warriors like Ken Paxton to seasoned and effective Appropriators like Susan Collins. Conservative Republicans lost. Traditional Republicans lost. Moderate Republicans lost. All kinds of Republicans lost. It is a total and complete rejection of the GOP, top to bottom. An unmitigated disaster.

There are two questions that remain. What will happen to the MAGA movement now? And can we ever return to the good old days before Trump made politics a blood sport more akin to Ultimate Fighting than to the World Wrestling Federation?

The answer is this: Unless Republicans fundamentally change how they communicate to voters and what they promise to do for them, they will not win another election. MAGA will be lost forever. Governing is about building coalitions, not about belittling potential allies with sophomoric attacks and needlessly partisan rhetoric.

Like Andrew Jackson, President Trump has forever changed American politics, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever completely return to the good old days of disagreeing without being disagreeable. But voters showed that they had grown tired of Mr. Trump’s brand of disagreeableness by delivering to the Democrats a huge political victory.

This election was not an endorsement of Democratic policies. It was a referendum on Trumpism and his caustic brand of politics. We will see if he got the message.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

DEARBORN, Mich. — Campaigning relentlessly across Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed didn’t highlight the possibility that he could become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. But with victory in hand, he savored his triumph over the vitriol aimed at him and his fellow Muslim Americans.

“They tried to demonize people because of how they pray,” he told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “And Michigan — the whole Michigan — clapped back. People don’t want that. They’re sick of it.”

He showed his pride in his victory speech, declaring: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”

Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath yanked anti-Muslim sentiment into the forefront of American life, those emotions are shared by many Muslim Americans in Michigan and across the country.

They saw a surge of anti-Muslim rhetoric after Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor a year ago, and they saw the attacks intensify as El-Sayed became the new prime target. President Trump called him a “jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists.” Dozens of Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress formed a Sharia-Free America Caucus, depicting Islam’s religious code as a threat to the U.S. Constitution.

But now, after El-Sayed’s defeat of GOP rival Mike Rogers was confirmed early Wednesday, there is a pervasive sense that a broader victory is at hand.

The outcome “represents a historic turning point for American Muslim political engagement and a historic defeat for the politics of hate,” said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Anti-Muslim extremists, Israel lobby groups and even the president of the United States used every smear in the book to paint Dr. El-Sayed as a Muslim bogeyman,” he said. “None of it was true, and none of it worked. Anti-Muslim hate was on the ballot, and it failed.”

In Dearborn, talk of ‘a beautifully American story’

Excitement over El-Sayed’s victory was palpable in Dearborn, a city near Detroit with a sizable Arab American population. The mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said residents showed up at the ballot box in huge numbers.

“What a beautifully American story,” Hammoud said. “One of our brightest and best earned the support of the majority of Michiganders who participated in yesterday’s election. And regardless of the direction in which he prays, they’re sending him to the U.S. Senate.”

Hammoud, who has known El-Sayed for more than a decade, said although his win was important for many Arab Americans, people voted for him because of his platform, not his identity. He cited support in Dearborn for independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Sanders, who is Jewish and caucuses with Democrats, ran on a progressive platform.

In El-Sayed, residents of Dearborn “finally saw themselves and a candidate who appealed to them, but it had to do with far more than just his ethnicity or his religion,” Hammoud said. “It was honestly because of the policies and building a coalition with this community in an honest way.”

When Zaynah Jadallah, 26, canvassed for El-Sayed in Dearborn, she said most people told her they already planned on voting for him before inviting her in for water or food. She credited the name recognition to El-Sayed’s grassroots campaigning and his pride in his Egyptian heritage.

“He’s always been proud of his identity. He never shied away from it or from saying his name,” Jadallah said.

Yasmin El-Sayed, no relation to the senator-elect, took her two daughters to the Detroit watch party from New York. She teared up after the victory speech.

“Having grown up in a post-9/11 world, being Muslim, being Arab myself, never in a million years did I think we would see what we saw today,” she said.

In a time of suspicion of government, a message of representation

El-Sayed depicted his election as a victory for all those “who don’t see themselves reflected in our government or who’ve been told that they don’t belong for some reason or another — not just how they pray but who they love, how they identify, the color of their skin, where they grew up.″

“I didn’t run to be the first Muslim senator. I ran to be the next senator of the state of Michigan who happens to be Muslim,” he said. ″But I also know that democracy is constantly about the conversation about who we are, who we want to be.”

“Michigan proved just how big we are. Rejected a hateful, spiteful campaign that had nothing to say about the issues and only wanted to point to my name and my face,” he added. ″I want all of those folks out there who have been told that America’s not big enough for them to reflect on that. America really is big enough for all of us.”

Mohamed Gula, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, said he was elated by El-Sayed’s triumph after a year of “extremely Islamophobic and disgusting rhetoric being used as a campaign strategy.”

“For Abdul to come out last night and use his full name meant the world to someone who grew up in post-9/11 America, where the Muslim American community was seen through a national security lens,” Gula said.

“Our children, years from now, will be able to run for office,” he said, “to be seen as who they are.”

A debate over the place of sharia law — and its very definition

Among the most frequent targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric was sharia, the religious code that provides Muslims with guidance on how to lead righteous lives. At the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, some of the loudest cheers came after GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared: “Sharia law has no place in America.”

Muslim American civic leaders and scholars — in Texas and other states — responded forcefully to the anti-sharia rhetoric that dates back more than 15 years.

They passionately defended sharia — the way it’s practiced in the United States — as positive guidance that shares elements with the codes of other faiths, such as the Ten Commandments and the collective body of Jewish law derived from the Torah. They rebutted the claims of GOP critics that sharia is a coercive code that threatens the Constitution and the judicial system.

Gula noted that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton were among the leaders of the anti-sharia campaign. Abbott lost his bid for reelection in Tuesday’s voting, and Paxton was trounced by Democrat James Talarico in the race for a U.S. Senate seat.

“I saw this as not just Muslims standing against Islamophobia as never before,” Gula said. “I saw Americans saying hate will not be used as a campaign issue … we are not going to accept hate.”

Asma Uddin, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law, has argued that many American politicians are depicting ordinary Muslim religious practices — such as prayer, choice of apparel, family counseling and mosque attendance — as evidence of political danger.

“What I find especially exciting is that El-Sayed won in a political climate where being visibly Muslim can still be a liability,” she said. His victory “gives us real reason for optimism. It suggests that anti-Muslim attacks don’t necessarily carry the political weight that those deploying them assume they do.”

GaNun, Cappelletti and Crary write for the Associated Press. Cappelletti reported from Washington and Crary from New York.

The Dodgers lost four straight playoff games to the Milwaukee Brewers in a humiliating end to their season.

But this was worse.

Steve Hilton lost to Xavier Becerra in the race for governor before “Jeopardy” aired.

But this was worse.

President Trump lost early, late and often Tuesday night in the midterm elections.

In contests across the country — for governor, for Senate, for the House — he had told people to vote as if he was on the ballot.

They did, and Democrats ran the table, taking the House and then the Senate.

Trump lost big, inspected the wreckage, and claimed the problem was lousy candidates.

Has he lost a step? I would have expected him to say the election was stolen. All of the elections.

But maybe he realized that for all intents and purposes, his political career is over. Trump was trounced, the country triumphed, and the long national nightmare is over, but for the rest of his lame duck presidency.

I don’t think we were witnessing a national love affair with Democrats, nor do I think Tuesday night’s winning political party has all the answers on any of the day’s pressing matters. The Dems have their own problems, including an identity crisis and a shortage of bankable presidential prospects.

But the country’s voters signaled loud and clear that they’re tired of:

The lies.

The insults and name-calling.

The hatred.

The chaos.

The self-dealing.

The lack of civility.

The absence of humility.

Last week I turned on the news and saw Trump making fun of the name of newly elected Michigan Sen. Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim.

An awful thing to see a president do, but here’s what’s worse:

I wasn’t surprised.

Then I saw him say at a political rally that he had looked at a man’s rear end, “and I’ve never done that before…Off the record, women, yes, men no, OK?”

Again, no surprise.

He once mocked the physical appearance of a female presidential primary foe, as well as the wife of a male foe, and insisted for years that the first Black president was secretly from Africa.

Trump had always been able to get away with this sort of numbskullery. His true believers were willing to put up with it as long as he seemed true to his promise of working on their behalf. Until they could no longer deny that he was only working on his own behalf.

The cryptocurrency profiteering. The bloody ballroom. The gold-plating of the White House.

All of it while working people, including staunch supporters, struggled to understand the goofball tariffs and wondered when the promise of lower grocery prices would be delivered.

Trump and the Republicans might have prevailed Tuesday night if not for the war in Iran, which everyone is still paying for at the gas pump. The president who promised we’d stay out of international conflicts went all in, for no good reason, then said it was over, we won, except that it’s not over, and we didn’t win.

And there’s no exit plan.

But so what?

It’s not like Trump is paying for gas. His golf cart is probably electric.

In the beginning, as a Republican populist who tapped into justifiable voter disapproval of Democratic leadership, Trump was onto something when he first ran for president. The scapegoating of immigrants was odious even then, but in 2016, at a Trump campaign rally in Arizona, I caught a glimpse of his appeal to adoring fans who cheered the presidential candidate’s vow to build a border wall, strengthen the military and make America great again. A struggling low-wage worker told me Trump was the best hope for a new day.

“We’re going to come back and rebuild our country,” Trump told the approving crowd that day in Arizona. “You will never be disappointed with me. … You are going to be so proud of your president.”

The act worked for way longer than I would have predicted. But 10 years later, and halfway through a second presidency, the gig is up. Voters said yes, they are disappointed, and no, they’re not so proud.

We thought we were having a mid-term election.

It turned out to be a political wake.

But also an awakening.

Red states voted for blue candidates in a nearly total Trump rebuke.

As I watched the returns Tuesday night, I thought about my daughter–an earth science grad student–and her generation. She’s 23, which means that for almost half her life, Trump has been a political force. Imagine being that young and living in a country that twice elected one of the most divisive and scabrous figures in history.

A man who attacked judges, invaded American cities, insisted ad nauseum that a lost election was stolen, pardoned the Jan. 6 barbarians, exonerated political donors and allies, called climate change a con job, gutted environmental protections and upended America’s global in scientific research.

It’s easy to understand why younger generations have lost faith in elections, both primary parties and the political/corporate establishment.

But on Tuesday, voters of all ages turned out and said enough already, in states red and blue.

The man who so bitterly divided us might ultimately have united us, at least for an evening.

That doesn’t mean that there is consensus on much of anything. Surely calamity awaits, just beyond the shadows, and new species of political trolls are being spawned as we live and breathe. But there was hope, on election night, in the collective declaration that we deserve and demand better.

Trump once said he was so popular and powerful, he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York, shoot somebody, and not lose any voters.

It might have been true once.

But he’s lost them now.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

To understand the coming collision between President Donald Trump and a Democratic Congress, one must first discard the textbook formulas of US governance. The United States is about to witness a political experiment for which there is no modern precedent: a purely transactional populist, entirely unmoored from traditional ideological orthodoxy, forced to share power with a legislative branch unified in partisan hostility.

The conventional wisdom predicts immediate, paralysing gridlock. That is a misreading of the terrain. Trump does not view politics through the lens of conservative dogma or constitutional restraint; he views it through the lens of the deal. Consequently, his governance will not be characterised by passive stagnation, but by an aggressive, volatile mix of transactional bipartisanship and raw executive unilateralism.

Domestically, the ideological lines will blur. For decades, the Republican Party was defined by its commitment to limited government and free markets. Trump has spent a decade dismantling that consensus. Confronted with a Democratic House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, he will feel no tribal loyalty to standard conservative policy. Instead, expect him to seek out areas of populist overlap.

When it comes to massive infrastructure spending, protectionist trade policy and aggressive state intervention to protect domestic manufacturing, Trump is often closer to the Democratic centre-left than to the ghost of former President Ronald Reagan. He will dare the opposition majorities to vote against legislation that pours millions of dollars into their districts or levies tariffs that protect their blue-collar constituents. It will be an unholy, ad hoc alliance — issue-by-issue, fleeting, and transactional — designed to deliver the optics of victory for both a populist president and a vulnerable congressional majority.

Where such transactions fail, however, the venue will shift from the legislative chamber to the administrative state controlled by the executive. Trump will not accept the traditional boundaries of a divided government. If necessary, he will govern by decree. Executive orders, emergency declarations and expansive interpretations of federal statutes will be deployed to bypass a stubborn Capitol Hill. The administration will dare the Democratic leadership to tie up the government in the federal courts, turning the slow wheels of the judiciary into a political weapon.

Yet, the true test of this fragile constitutional architecture will not occur on the domestic stage. It will happen abroad, specifically in the volatile expanses of the Middle East, where the executive branch enjoys its greatest constitutional latitude.

The immediate flashpoint is Iran. The Trump doctrine rests on a foundation of maximum economic pressure backed by highly unpredictable, asymmetric tactical deterrence. It is a posture designed to keep adversaries off balance. But a Democratic Congress, historically wedded to the framework of multilateral diplomacy and deeply wary of congressionally unauthorised foreign entanglements, will view this unpredictability not as a strategic asset but as an existential danger.

The US is likely headed for a historic constitutional showdown over the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Democratic majorities will also aggressively use the power of the purse to place statutory fences around the commander-in-chief, attempting to defund military manoeuvres or explicitly prohibit unilateral escalations against Tehran. Trump will treat these attempts at legislative constraints with open contempt. Asserting an absolute, almost unrestrained reading of the Constitution’s Article II executive authority, the president will argue that modern geopolitical threats require executive agility, not governance by congressional committee. When the rockets fly, the president will act unilaterally, leaving Congress to meaningless academic debates.

Hanging over this entire drama is the ultimate constitutional weapon: the threat of impeachment by Congress. In a Washington where both the House and the Senate are controlled by the president’s opponents, oversight will cease to be an instrument of governance and become an engine of partisan political destruction.

Democratic congressional committee chairs will launch a relentless, multifront campaign of subpoenas and investigations. Every member of Trump’s cabinet will live in a permanent state of interrogation; every foreign policy decision will be audited for high crimes and misdemeanours. The House will almost certainly draft articles of impeachment, not as an extraordinary remedy for rare misconduct, but as a routine penalty for political nonconformity.

Yet, this strategy carries severe risks for the opposition. Trump does not fear institutional warfare; he thrives on it. He will transform the spectacle of congressional investigations into the theatre of public grievance. To his base, a hostile Congress will be framed not as a coequal branch of government performing its constitutional duty, but as an illegitimate, obstructionist cabal subverting the will of the forgotten American voter.

Because the structural math of the Senate requires a two-thirds majority for removal of the president, actual eviction from the Oval Office remains a statistical fantasy. Impeachment will therefore achieve not displacement, but a permanent state of institutional friction.

What the US is about to enter is not two years of legislative inactivity, but a phase of perpetual brinkmanship. It will be an era in which governance occurs only in the narrow, volatile intervals between constitutional crises. The US system was built to withstand institutional tension, but it also requires a basic reverence for institutional boundaries to function. With a transactional populist president in the White House and an adversarial army on Capitol Hill, those boundaries will be tested as never before. The architecture will hold, but the foundation will shake.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The stakes in Tuesday’s midterm elections are so high that Shane Dunn voted for the first time in his life, at age 65.

After a career as a cook up and down the East Coast, Dunn moved to the Philadelphia suburbs and voted last week in Levittown. “I was always a busy man,” he said outside his polling place. But now, “I’m learning what’s going on within our country, and this is actually what brought me out.”

Democrats got his vote. “It feels great, to put my word in,” he said, patting the “I Voted” sticker on his black hoodie.

Voters across the United States are getting their word in, too, as they determine which party controls the Senate and the House and takes charge of governors’ offices, legislatures and state leadership posts in the final two years of Republican Trump’s presidency.

What many of them see is that the America they’ve known is slipping away.

They see lawlessness coming from those who create the laws. They see hate stirred by politicians among neighbors, corruption at every turn, billionaires ruling the roost and a culture that doesn’t speak to how they live — in short, American bedrock at risk of crumbling. Not to mention those crazy gas prices.

In dozens of Associated Press interviews with people who cast ballots at advance polling places or drop boxes across the country, the angst was palpable, most sharply from those who oppose Trump but also from many who support him.

A vote is cast to stop the ‘madness’

“I saw my vote today as trying to put the brakes on just the madness,” said Arthur Horner, 59, who runs a food importing and marketing company that has been hurt by tariffs, after dropping his mail ballot at Dauphin County’s election bureau in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He voted for Democrats.

In Sioux City, Iowa, cattle rancher Elizabeth Marlett, 61, voted in Woodbury County’s historic Prairie-style courthouse and walked out stewing about a variety of things — the chemicals in processed food, her son’s struggles to get his veterans’ benefits and, perhaps most of all, what she sees as society’s leftward lurch. Things seem broken to her, too.

“Family values are going by the wayside, and they need to be brought back,” she said. “Our liberties have been stomped all over. Religion has been stomped all over. And I believe we in the majority need to step up and stop being silent.” She voted Republican.

Voters despair at the stoking of anger by Trump and allies

The anger in the air, stirred by a cursing president who abides no slights, is too much for some people.

“He’s just destroying us,” Democrat Linda Markle, 72, said of the president. She spoke outside the Warminster Township library in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

“I am so afraid for this country,” she said. “People used to look out for each other. Not anymore.”

“All people do now is just hate each other,” she said, and Trump “seems to have given them the courage to go ahead and be like that. … The division is horrible, absolutely horrible, and I can’t wait to see the back of him.”

Republican Chris Smith, 27, a Harrisburg software engineer who voted for Trump in 2024, sympathizes with Markle’s sentiment, to a point.

“A lot of people hate him for various reasons, and I can understand why,” he said, noting that ”I think he’s kind of going a bit crazy on a lot of things.” But he likes Trump’s effort to return manufacturing to the U.S. along with the goals of his tariffs, and he voted Republican because he still thinks that party is more fiscally responsible than Democrats.

In Ohio, Lori Wilkinson, a retired home health worker from New Pittsburg, and her husband, David, a janitor, consider themselves independents. David recently wrote to their Republican governor, Mike DeWine, to tell him what a good job he’s doing, and they voted for Republican George W. Bush for president in the past.

Trump? “He’s the worst president in United States history,” David said from the Wayne County election center. “You get up every day, and you’re like, ‘What’s he going to do now?’” Said Lori: “He’s got the hate just so bad, it’s just out of hand. It’s just out of control.” She fears that if Democrats win widely Tuesday, Trump will “go fricking berserk.”

Trump supporter Therese Mennell gets it. “There’s that kind of arrogant vibe about him that people don’t like, and sometimes I shut him off because of the way he talks,” the retiree said from the Wayne County center. “But, I mean, he’s doing the right thing. He is saving our country.”

Some pretend Trump is on the ballot

Despite his striking unpopularity in polls, Trump repeatedly asked supporters to pretend he’s on the midterm ballot, betting that would motivate fans to vote who otherwise might not. But that cuts both ways.

Samontae Mwangi, 20, and his brother, Gathenya Mwangi, 19, voted for the first time, casting early ballots Tuesday at their election center in Topeka, Kansas. Both work at a plant that manufactures trackside buildings for railroads.

They went with their grandfather, Lynn Henderson, 68, a retired Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. worker and a former Marine lance corporal who wore a Marine’s cap. Henderson said he took his grandsons to vote because his own mother died recently and he wanted them to have an event to remember him when he’s gone.

All three are hoping that the election produces Democratic victories and political change. Gathenya said the economy and discontent with Trump could motivate people who’ve voted in the past to show up, as well as those who never have. “It really could change, make a difference, I feel, if a lot of people vote,” he said.

Denise Wunder, a retired sandwich shop manager, pulled up to the center in a van featuring a decorative license plate with an American eagle. The strong Trump supporter is the daughter of Democrats. Illegal immigration is her top issue.

“I think Trump is kind of our last hope, because otherwise this world’s going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. “Yeah, he says stupid stuff, but, you know, so do we.”

In the Richmond, Virginia, suburb of Henrico County, voters arrived at a steady clip on a crisp fall afternoon a week from Election Day. The moment of decision found one conservative couple, Joan and Frank Bark, lamenting the country’s direction.

“I’m afraid Trump has gotten so egotistical, it’s affecting his ability to make intelligent or more favorable decisions,” Frank said. But, he said, “I don’t want the decisions that would be generated from that far left side, either.”

Joan, a retiree like her husband, said of Democrats: “I haven’t found very much that they want to change or work with. It’s just mostly, ‘I hate Trump.’” But Trump really isn’t on the ballot. They voted for Republican candidates.

In Nanuet, New York, people streamed into the small room of a community center to vote; some were in Halloween costumes. Primrose D. Sullivan, a nurse, is an independent. She scoffed at Trump’s wish that voters act as if he’s running.

“No, because he’s not,” she said. “When a patient comes into the hospital, you want me dealing in facts, not in, ‘Hmm, let me act like you might have cancer.’ No. Do you or do you not have cancer? We need to proceed based on facts.” She voted for Democrats.

Yet some see a cancer on politics, if not the presidency

Sullivan was among a number of voters who singled out the billionaires Trump has made common cause with and how that might feed into American decline.

“I don’t begrudge any of our wealthy people, Jeff Bezos or, you know, Elon Musk,” she said. “But I do have a certain problem with them wanting more and more and doing things that really don’t help humanity.”

“If we keep going the way these guys are going,” she went on, meaning both the political and CEO classes, “we’re not going to have anything like what we had in the past.” Theirs is a “self-destructive attitude,” she added, “because, honestly, if the whole planet destroys itself, the wealthy go with us.”

Outside the polling station at the YMCA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, Benjamin Updegraft offered a piercing denunciation of the elite as he traced his evolution from a “full-throated young Republican” who voted for Trump as a young man in 2016 to a “lifetime Democrat,” after casting his ballot in the Senate race.

He cited Musk’s throttling of his Starlink satellite internet service in Ukraine, which disrupted a key defense against Russian attacks, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad in the Ohio governor’s race featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton among the reasons powerful men must be brought to heel.

“That needs to be cut out from this country like a cancer,” Updegraft said. “We have an incredible responsibility to take back the stranglehold that the worst people in this country have on the reins of power and to inflict punishment on them for their actions.”

In Scottsdale, Arizona, David Lee described his conservative upbringing, his past voting for Republicans and now his decision to turn against that party and vote Democratic in the contested races for governors and the House. He considers Trump’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement to be lawless.

“Nobody wants open borders, but you’re treating these people without due process, sending people to countries they don’t even belong to,” said Lee, 63. “There’s no more rules.”

Then there are those prices. And that war

The Trump supporters interviewed by the AP at the polls signaled their tolerance of the surge of gas prices from the Iran war, in some cases blaming factors other than the actual cause. Nor did they break with him on the war itself.

Among them was David Stouffer, 59, branch manager for a mortgage bank and three-time Trump voter, who spoke outside the Harrisburg elections office. “Iran has been killing Americans for 50 freaking years,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll suffer with some higher gas prices in the interim until they get that nonsense figured out.”

Does that put a crunch on your household budget, Stouffer was asked. “Of course it does.” How to cope with that? “I just keep driving.”

“He’s made the tax cuts real,” Stouffer said. “He has secured the borders. That, to me, is a very, very big deal.”

By the dozens, Democrats, independents and Republicans outside the core of Trump’s support differed with that assessment, even as some of them granted the president his achievements on taxes and immigration.

Horner, the food importer, is going “bonkers” with the tariffs and all the other moves bouncing between the Trump administration and the courts while a “feckless” and now electorally endangered Republican Congress largely stands aside.

“You can’t do business when every month you have to readjust your pricing because the president gets a wild hair on something that he’s not even constitutionally allowed to do,” Horner said. He added, “He’s just playing out the clock on all of this stuff — where you just know he knows it’s wrong.

“And what do we have? Higher healthcare, higher food, higher gas, a business environment that is complete chaos.”

But Jerry Casner, 74, of Mechanicsburg, a suburb of Harrisburg, wants as much of Trump as he can get. Alas, “he can’t run again,” Casner noted.

“Well, technically,” Casner said, “he can’t run again.”

Levy, Catalini, Hanna and Woodward write for the Associated Press. Hanna reported from Topeka, Kan.; Levy from Harrisburg, Pa.; Catalini from Levittown, Pa.; and Woodward from Washington. AP journalists Julie Carr Smyth in Wooster, Ohio; Erik Verduzco in Fort Mill, S.C.; Thomas Beaumont in Sioux City, Iowa; Joseph Frederick in Nanuet, N.Y.; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Warminster, Pa.; Mikella Schuettler in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Sarah Rankin in Henrico, Va., contributed to this report.

A NEW set of rules is coming into play from tomorrow for anyone heading to the States.

It comes as the Democratic Republic of the Congo faces the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record.

Brits travelling to or through the States will have to sign a waiver to confirm they have not recently been to the Congo as a form of prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said anyone ‘willfully providing false or misleading information may lead to criminal fines and imprisonment’.

Brits need to either physically or digitally sign a statement stating that they have not been in the Congo within 21 days of flying into the US.

Taking a connecting flight through an airport in the Congo still counts as being present in the country.

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This is the case even for those who don’t leave the airport or even the plane during this time.

The order only applies to air travel, not land or sea travel.

The waiver can be completed by printing and signing the PDF from the CDC and handing it to the airline at check in.

Some airlines may have the declaration electronically for those who check in online.

For example, Delta said that passengers may complete the form upon check in via the app.

The rules look to vary airline to airline, so it’s advised to check the individual website and contact them for clarification if necessary.

As of October 27, the CDC said there havebeen moree than 10,200 Ebola cases in the Congo and nearly 5,000 deaths.

According to local news, there are currently no reports of an outbreak in the US.

It also adds that the chance of it spreading to the US is low, but that prevention is still necessary.

The new waiver rules will come into play from November 3 – there are more details on the CDC website.

Dolores Huerta, the fiery and resolute activist who helped launch and guide the nation’s first enduring labor union for poor farmworkers and later became an inspiration to women and liberal true believers, has died. She was 96.

Erik Olvera, a spokesman for Huerta’s family, told The Times on Wednesday that Huerta died in Bakersfield, surrounded by members of her “huge family.” The cause, he said, was cancer.

“It’s a tough time,” Olvera said. “She was incredibly beloved, and not only was she beloved, but she was an icon to so many people around the country and around the world, really. If anything, her family is clinging to memories and clinging to each other as they mourn.”

Huerta never gave up on her dream of a more equitable distribution of wealth in America, campaigning for working people for years beyond standard retirement age.

The emotional compass of the United Farm Workers of America for decades, the petitemother of 13 attained singular stature as a rule-breaking proto-feminist, godmother of the Chicano power movement and doyenne of American labor.

Huerta’s fervent crusading for the dispossessed made her the potent alter ego to her union co-founder, the soft-spoken and methodical César Chávez, though the full complexity and pathology of their relationship only became apparent late in her life.

The duo’s history took an unexpected and dark turn in March 2026, when two women came forward to say they had been sexually assaulted by Chávez when they were teenage girls, with Huerta telling the New York Times that the venerated labor leader also had twice forced sex on her, resulting in a pair of pregnancies.

Nearly 96 at the time, Huerta said she had remained silent for six decades to protect the farmworker movement. But she added: “I now understand that I am a survivor — of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

Some wished Huerta had spoken out earlier, at least within the insular union, in order to prevent others from being victimized. But her many champions insisted the late-life revelation reflected badly only on Chávez, who for decades before his fall from grace had been an American civil rights icon and a virtual secular saint to the political left.

Some historians insist that Huerta be given full recognition for teaming with Chávez during much of the early foundational work that produced the UFW, from its founding in 1962 in the San Joaquin Valley farm town of Delano through her leave from full-time work with the union in the late 1980s.

It was Huerta who hurried from pickup truck to back stoop to pool hall, to recruit many of the union’s first members; Huerta who stormed up and down the picket lines to keep striking workers out of the fields; Huerta who helped negotiate one of the first contracts ever for farmworkers in North America; and Huerta who struggled to keep the union relevant, as its membership and clout faded. She turned the phrase “Sí, se puede!” into a chant that animated rallies and marches well into a new century.

Complications and byzantine controversies helped stymie the union in its adolescence, with Huerta usually supporting Chávez, even as he became distracted from the union’s central work and demanded absolute power. Their obsession with loyalty and often-imagined conspiracies ended with purges of some of the UFW’s most dynamic leaders and organizing stagnation, even as field hands continued to labor under abysmal conditions.

Huerta later devoted much of her time to women’s rights, Democratic Party politics and community organizing.

In 1999, the 69-year-old great-grandmother helped obtain extra government benefits for workers who lost their jobs in a citrus freeze and stared across the contract bargaining table at lawyers for the giant Gallo wine company. Even late in life she still toured the nation as a public speaker and used her foundation to register voters and campaign for progressive causes. Liberal groups clamored to have Huerta at the front of their marches. Often sporting a jaunt red beret, she locked arms with activists one-quarter her age.

Her Dolores C. Huerta Foundation supported endeavors as diverse as a performing arts camp for children, higher education mentoring for high school students and food distribution to victims of floods that inundated the Central Valley in 2023. The foundation became something of a family business — headed by her daughter, Camila Chávez, and supported by legal advice from her son, Emilio Huerta, while four other relatives served on the board.

In another step to cement Huerta’s legacy, one of her nonprofits broke ground in 2025 for the Dolores Huerta Peace & Justice Cultural Center in Bakersfield, the San Joaquin Valley city she called home. The $35-million project, paid for largely by the state of California, will include an academy to teach future generations how to become community organizers. “They are the ones who are going to guide us forward,” the 95-year-old told a crowd, which stood under a scorching sun for the groundbreaking.

Through it all, Huerta insisted her primary loyalty remained la causa — the struggle to win better wages, working and living conditions for poor people, particularly farmworkers.

Beginning with the early organizing days in the 1960s, Huerta inspired passions almost as intense as her own. She won almost breathless admiration from followers for the way she faced down sometimes violent anti-union forces, worked for days with little rest and negotiated late into the night, while others faded. She alienated others with a waspish temper, an unwillingness to forgive even small slights and inattention to some of the details that make a union work.

To the union faithful, she was the “Madonna of the Fields.” Some said Huerta reminded them of the soldaderas, a handful of women warriors who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa into battle during the Mexican Revolution. The growers, whom she almost always scorned, had another name for her: “the dragon lady.”

A woman of frenetic energy who lived in a world of myriad contradictions, Huerta was one of the only women in many board rooms and union halls full of men. She was a jet-setting, president-schmoozing pragmatist, who in unguarded moments spoke mystically about her two youthful encounters with UFOs. She was the devout Catholic who had the last four of her children with a man she never married, Richard Chávez, Cesar’s younger brother. (Only in 2026 did she acknowledge having two other daughters, given to others to raise, fathered by César Chávez.)

Her relationship with Cesar Chávez was as complex as it was volatile — a fact acknowleged by UFW regulars long before Huerta’s charges about his sexual misconduct.

The two met through their work for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a progressive group that sought better government services and equal rights for poor and minority people. Both were called to the cause by the organization’s founder Fred Ross Sr. — Huerta in Stockton and Chávez in San Jose — and later united over their common concern for farmworkers. But even when he became statewide leader of the CSO, Chávez could not persuade the group to focus its energies on organizing field workers.

It was 1961 and Chávez was living in East Los Angeles when he called Huerta to his home one day and said, “We have got to start the union. If we don’t do it, nobody else will,” Huerta once recalled. He left the CSO, and Huerta followed.

Both soon moved their families to the Kern County farm town of Delano. Chávez relied on Huerta for nearly everything. When she wasn’t going door-to-door to recruit new members, Huerta negotiated with growers and created union hiring halls. She formed farmworker ranch committees and moved to the East Coast for months to promote the union’s national grape boycott.

But Chávez and his right hand also clashed routinely during their decades-long collaboration. The two would explode in shouting matches over strategy, while other union leaders shrank from the room. In audio recordings of one 1979 confrontation reviewed by the New York Times, Huerta fought back and demanded respect as Chávez called her a “stupid bitch” and accused her of stealing. Huerta might quit, or be fired. Inevitably, she would be back in the fold within a few days or weeks.

“Their commitment to the cause trumped all else and grew into a mutual dependence that survived decades of discord,” wrote Miriam Pawel, a former Los Angeles Times editor, in the biography “The Crusades of Cesar Chávez.” Asked by ABC News if she tried to protect Chávez, Huerta replied, “Always. Always.”

During a wine grape strike in the Central Valley, Huerta and other UFW women once locked arms in a human blockade between the union’s male picketers and replacement workers wielding two-by-fours. She blocked one worker’s car with her own, to prevent him from going to work and breaking a 1965 strike against rose growers in McFarland.

Chávez never doubted Huerta’s resolve. He once called her “totally fearless, both mentally and physically.”

Her years of community organizing in Stockton taught Huerta how to inspire even the most humble of her poor constituents.

In the union’s founding days, Huerta helped recruit a 19-year-old grape picker named Eliseo Medina to perform a one-man picket at the Port of Los Angeles — supposedly to stop the loading of a shipment of non-union grapes. The grapes never materialized. But Medina recalled how Huerta’s spirit and determination galvanized him.

“Dolores had a gift for making you believe in yourself,” Medina said. “She has an ability to inspire you and urge you to do things you could not think were possible. She is one of those life-changers.”

An Echo Park mural features Dolores Huerta alongside artist Frida Kahlo.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Medina left the Chávez-Huerta led union, believing it had strayed from its core work. He went on to become the international secretary treasurer of the more than 2-million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — just one of many UFW acolytes who fueled the labor movement as it staged a modest resurgence in the 21st century.

Huerta was at the center of many of the union’s landmark achievements, including the negotiation of a contract in 1966 with the Schenley Wine Co. It was the first labor agreement obtained by farmworkers themselves with an agricultural company, according to the union’s history.

But the UFW’s fortunes would rise and fall. One low ebb came in 1973 with the loss of many contracts to the Teamsters Union, which struck sweetheart deals with growers. But some union insiders also complained that the UFW had failed by not winning enough concessions for the workers it represented. The union’s membership plummeted.

Two years later, momentum swung again, as the union helped persuade California Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to impose the toughest farm labor regulations in the nation.

The union’s membership would spiral downward until Chávez’s death, at 66, in 1993. There was a sense among many insiders that the union became overly insular, with repeated purges designed to promote absolute fealty to Chávez.

In one incident, students graduating from English classes at the union’s headquarters, La Paz, ended a slide show with the words: “The Union is not César Chávez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers.” Huerta, fuming, demanded to know which of the teachers had planted this message, which she viewed as an act of treason against Chávez — an episode detailed by one of the teachers, Jeffrey W. Rubin, who went on to become a history professor at Boston University.

“Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at, called ‘chicken s—’ by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union,” wrote Rubin, who kept the episode quiet for years.

At the same time, the UFW lost contracts and sometimes failed to provide the benefits it promised to workers. Huerta was one of many union leaders unable to set Chávez, and the UFW, on a better path.

Dolores Huerta at rosary, standing next to the body of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) at rest in the pine coffin in Delano, Calif., on Wednesday, April 28, 1993.

(Jose Galvez/Los Angeles Times)

As Chávez’ son-in-law Arturo Rodriguez took control of the union in 1993 and began clawing to regain members and clout, Huerta remained the UFW’s most public persona.

At hundreds of marches across the nation that she attended with regularity throughout her life, parents would push forward, telling their children they were witnessing a historic figure. Asked for an autograph, she would boldly scrawl: “Sí, se puede.”

The phrase — “Yes, it can be done” — had been part of the union’s fabric since 1972, when some doubters suggested the union would fail in its campaign against an anti-union law in Arizona. Huerta responded, “Sí, se puede,” creating a mantra for the American left.

Born April 10, 1930, in Dawson, a small mining town in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Dolores Clara Fernandez moved to Stockton when she was 3, along with her mother, two brothers and two sisters. Her father and mother had divorced, but Juan Fernandez’s legend had been fixed — a brawling union leader and New Mexico state legislator. Her mother, a hotel operator, believed in public service and would not let the poorest guests go hungry.

Dolores thrived on a middle-class upbringing of Girl Scouts, violin lessons and tap dancing, describing her mother’s generosity as a guiding force. She was bright and popular and even founded a teen center where she and other kids hung out.

But Dolores would recall her high school years as a time of slights and rewards not received — injustices she linked to her Mexican American heritage. When police ordered her teen center shut down, it became clear it was because they did not like whites socializing with Mexican American, Black and Filipino kids.

Those setbacks would not be forgotten.

Dolores Huerta in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2019.

(Associated Press)

After community college in Stockton, Huerta became a teacher. But she left after just a year, because, she said: “I thought I could do more by organizing farmworkers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

Soon she met Ross and Chávez and her life’s path would be set. Even her name seemed to brand her for the work. When she divorced her second husband, Chávez advised her to hold on to her last name. Dolores Huerta means Sorrows of the Orchard.

Along the way, there would be great personal heartache.

In 1968, she was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The Democratic presidential front-runner had just finished his California primary victory speech — thanking Chávez and Huerta — when an assassin gunned him down.

Twenty years later, her politics thrust Huerta even more directly in the path of violence. A television camera captured the images of a San Francisco police officer clubbing her as she and others peacefully picketed an appearance by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The blows ruptured Huerta’s spleen and nearly killed her.

She later won an $850,000 settlement from the city for the attack. Some in the union said that Chávez‘s insistence that Huerta give the money up to the UFW created another rift that caused her to leave the union.

Huerta would struggle, as well, to find time for her expansive family — which in the end included 13 children, counting the two fathered by César Chávez.

Among her greatest heartaches grew out of the struggles of her oldest daughter, Celeste, a schizophrenic who, on occasion, would leave the institutions where she lived and wander the streets.

Huerta’s union zealotry would inspire a range of emotions from her other children.

“We understood very quickly she wasn’t ours to have,” said son Emilio, the lawyer, a Central Valley activist.“She sort of belonged to the farmworker movement. And it was our job to support her.”

He and several other of the Huerta offspring devoted their lives to the UFW and related causes, basking in a sense that their family played a part in history. That did not always make up for the personal slights — the times their mother would fob them off on union allies or neighbors, or miss a birthday.

In a bittersweet essay, Dolores’ daughter Juanita once recalled how her mother forgot to pick her up from junior high school. She compared Huerta to a train “rattling all the windows behind me, blaring out its horn, announcing its simultaneous arrival and departure with an incredible clamor, but rushing constantly forward.”

At a 69th birthday party in 1999, Huerta told a large dinner gathering that her own sacrifices had been overblown.

“It was our families who sacrificed,” she said. She then told a story about driving a carload of children to school one day in an automobile limping along because a tire had been slashed by union opponents. “That,” she said, “was kind of how we made it through life.”

Approaching her 90th birthday in 2020, Huerta spent a day that might have been more typical for someone half her age. She protested at the Fresno County Board of Supervisors for increased pay for home healthcare workers, who made just $12 an hour. Huerta hadn’t planned on being arrested that day, but when she felt police used excessive force on one of the protest leaders, she changed her mind. Take me too, she said, according to USA Today. Officers cinched a plastic zip-tie around her wrists and led her away.

More typically in her later years, she supported her foundation. In one moment, she might be campaigning for a bond measure for a middle school gym in the poor San Joaquin Valley community of Weedpatch; in seemingly the next, she would be stumping via Zoom for Joe Biden, during his fight to take the White House from President Trump.

In 2020, USA Today named Huerta one of the 100 women “who’ve made a substantial impact on our country or our lives over the past 100 years.” By then, at least half a dozen schools across America bore her name. Others considered taking her name after they removed Chávez’s following the sexual abuse revelations.

President Obama presented Huerta with the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012; the one-time community organizer, who made his way to the White House, honoring a woman still doing the work.

“The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized and took direct action,” Huerta said in accepting the honor. “It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today.”

Olvera, the family spokesman, said Wednesday that Huerta’s relatives would be announcing the details of a public memorial in the coming days.

The United States is once again at war in the Middle East, and most Americans say it isn’t worth the cost.

Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing asks why the US keeps fighting: oil, a $2.4 trillion defence industry, lobbyists or a political system that rarely holds anyone to account?

Retired General Mark Kimmitt and journalist Spencer Ackerman debate why, and whether voters can end the forever wars.

Contributors:

Mark Kimmitt – Retired US Army brigadier general and former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs

Spencer Ackerman – Journalist, author and writer of the Forever Wars newsletter

At 80, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pulled off an extraordinary political victory. After losing the first round to Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, by 47 percent to 45 percent, Lula defied the odds to secure a stunning second-round victory, with 51.8 percent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent.

His triumph confounded every pre-election poll and crowned a dramatic campaign revival that few had anticipated.

Lula’s victory in Latin America’s largest country does more than halt the far right’s return to power in Brazil. It breaks a succession of right-wing electoral victories across the region and deals a major blow to United States President Donald Trump’s increasingly interventionist agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

When Bolsonaro unexpectedly defeated Lula in the first round, the result sent shockwaves across Brazil and beyond. For the government, the defeat was particularly startling given its strong socioeconomic record. What followed was an extraordinary three-week political mobilisation that transformed the sluggish first-round campaign of Lula’s Workers’ Party into an existential confrontation over the future of democracy and sovereignty in Brazil.

The economic record was hardly that of a government heading for defeat. Brazil’s economy grew by a cumulative 9.2 percent between 2023 and 2025, compared with an average of just 5.6 percent among its South American neighbours. Unemployment fell from 9.3 percent in 2022 to a historic low of 5.4 percent in 2026.

Brazil also exited the United Nations Hunger Map in 2025, after having returned to it under the Bolsonaro senior administration. In the Amazon, deforestation fell to its lowest level in decades, a sharp reversal of the trend under his predecessor.

Not everything has been rosy under the Lula administration. Millions of Brazilians have remained trapped in credit-card debt, struggling with extremely high interest rates, while an explosion of online gambling has devastated the livelihoods of families. The run-off result sent a clear signal that there was social discontent.

Lula responded with unusually bold measures: a sweeping debt-relief initiative and restrictions on online betting, as well as expanded social benefits, fuel subsidies, and the transition from a six-day to a five-day working week. These policies sought to reconnect the government’s macroeconomic achievements with the everyday economic anxieties of Brazilian voters.

Bolsonaro offered a radically different vision for Brazil: sweeping spending cuts, privatisations, lower taxes and, above all, an iron-fisted response to crime and insecurity. His proposals included building five maximum-security prisons modelled on El Salvador’s notorious penitentiary system and authorising lethal force against heavily armed criminals.

Bolsonaro also pledged to pardon his father, sentenced to 27 years for plotting to overturn the 2022 election, and to grant clemency to those convicted over the January 8, 2023 assault on Brazil’s democratic institutions. For his supporters, this represented an opportunity to reverse what they considered judicial persecution. For his opponents, it threatened to rehabilitate the attempted coup and undermine judicial independence.

Lula’s campaign came back re-energised, with many young Brazilians mobilising at the grassroots level. The campaign was able to overcome even algorithmic bias by social media giants like Meta, which favoured Bolsonaro.

Ultimately, the election became a battle not only over Brazil’s democracy but also its sovereignty. Trump’s administration has intervened conspicuously in Brazilian politics throughout Lula’s term, imposing punitive tariffs, sanctioning a Supreme Court justice involved in Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution and openly embracing his son’s candidacy.

In May, Trump received Flavio Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Brazil’s two largest crime organisations as foreign terrorist organisations, a measure Flavio had publicly requested.

These designations carry implications extending far beyond electoral politics. They potentially open the door to US military operations on Brazilian territory under Washington’s expanding war on so-called “narcoterrorism”. The world saw how one such foreign terrorist designation enabled the US to intervene militarily in Venezuela and abduct its sitting president.

Whereas Trump seeks to draw Latin America’s largest country into Washington’s expanding system of hemispheric military dominance, Lula has defended Brazil’s strategic autonomy, insisting that cooperation against organised crime must respect national sovereignty.

He framed the election as a choice between a sovereign Brazil charting its own course and one subordinated to Washington’s geopolitical agenda. Sunday’s election result shows that the Brazilian people have made their choice.

Importantly, Lula’s victory may mark a turning point in Latin America’s rightward shift. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the right has scored a string of electoral victories in Honduras, Chile, and Bolivia, among others. But Lula’s re-election suggests that its momentum may be faltering.

The result comes just ahead of the US midterms and could deliver a significant setback to the strength of Trump’s leadership in the Americas. In Argentina, President Javier Milei — who regularly attacks Lula and threw all his weight behind Bolsonaro — has been sliding in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. In Chile, President Jose Antonio Kast has suffered an even more precipitous collapse in public support.

Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, has likely breathed a sigh of relief. A Lula defeat would have left her increasingly isolated in a region gravitating towards Mexico’s northern neighbour. Instead, Latin America’s two most populous countries and largest economies will remain firmly on the left for the foreseeable future.

It is too early to declare the region’s rightward turn over. But Lula’s victory raises the possibility that the wave has already crested. Brazil will not be joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and while the “Donroe Doctrine” remains a threat, its moment of greatest ascendancy may already be behind it.

Lula’s victory is a vindication of a lifetime spent fighting for society’s most marginalised and disenfranchised. And its significance extends far beyond Brazil’s borders. For defenders of democracy, multilateralism, international law, environmental protection and the sovereignty of the Global South, it sends a powerful message: the far right’s advance is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Not in Brazil. Not anywhere.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

WASHINGTON — N’nanba (Robin Rue Simmons) has spent years trying to answer a question that has vexed the United States since the abolition of slavery: What would it actually look like to repair the damage?

In Evanston, Ill., she helped turn that question into a $25,000 housing grant for Black residents whose families were harmed by discriminatory housing policies. Now, Rue Simmons is spreading the nation’s first municipal reparations program to more than 100 communities across the country.

But as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, there is a formidable hurdle: President Trump’s administration.

The administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and its broader efforts to curtail federal support for race-based initiatives and Black history, have prompted some institutions to reconsider or quietly scale back reparations work.

Those reversals come while at least part of the world community is reexamining the past. In March the U.N. General Assembly issued a resolution declaring the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations. More than 120 countries supported the resolution — only three voted against it — Argentina, Israel and the U.S. Fifty-two, including England and 27 members of the European Union, abstained.

“Under this administration, of course, there are many barriers to achieving that, but we still stand on federal redress as our collective north star,” Rue Simmons, the chairman of Evanston’s Reparations Committee and a former city councilwoman, told the Associated Press.

For more than 3½ centuries, the transatlantic slave trade forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans aboard ships bound for the Americas; some 1.8 million didn’t survive the journey.

Roughly 388,000 enslaved people were taken to what is now the U.S. and their enslavers maintained a system of chattel slavery, treating the enslaved and their children as property, until abolition in 1865.

Enslavement deprived generations of Black Americans their freedom and any meaningful share of the fruits of their labor. Jim Crow segregation, discrimination and systemic racism further depressed the Black population’s ability to build wealth that is still largely concentrated among white families.

From the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule, to modern-day reparations proposals, initiatives to address the legacy of slavery are entering a new era of political uncertainty.

“I don’t think that there’s been any president who’s been supportive of comprehensive Black reparations — for a long time it was just taboo to even speak the word,” said William Darity, who wrote a book on reparations with A. Kirsten Mullen.

“Now, Trump will speak the word, but with hostility,” he added.

“They want to steal your money for reparations,” Trump told his supporters during a speech in September. “Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. … The people that hate our country are asking for it, but it’s going nowhere.”

Marcus Anthony Hunter, a sociologist in African American studies at UCLA, said reparations are about atoning for the past crime of chattel slavery, even if some programs come in the form of housing grants or college scholarships instead of direct cash payments.

“It’s not even a lot of money that they are given. But it comes back to the recognition, the acknowledgment, responsibility and remedy,” he said.

The Trump administration disagrees and has entered the legal fight in Evanston to stop it from happening.

The Republican administration’s attacks on modern-day repayment efforts include a lawsuit in Evanston, which was initially filed by Judicial Watch.

Michael Bekesha, who represents the plaintiffs, says the Evanston program distributes funds based on race without specific harm identification. He argues the city’s program is unlike historical reparations programs.

“The Constitution prohibits governments from picking winners and losers based entirely on race,” Beshka told the AP.

The Justice Department this month received a federal judge’s permission to intervene in the case, alleging that the city’s actions violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act.

Last year, the Justice Department sent a letter of warning to leaders in Asheville and Buncombe County, N.C., contemplating creating their own programs.

Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement to the AP that “race-based government benefit programs are both unconstitutional and often violate federal civil rights laws.”

“Those implementing these programs do so in violation of federal law and the federal government has an obligation to stop them,” she said.

The White House referred questions to the Justice Department.

Georgetown University was one of the leaders, offering admission consideration for the descendants of enslaved people tied to the campus’ past, an effort that has continued despite Trump’s crackdown on campus DEI efforts.

But across higher education, new efforts have come to a standstill, said Richard Cellini, who previously led a Harvard University project to identify descendants of people enslaved by Harvard’s past leaders.

“People don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to hear about it, they’re not hiring for it,” Cellini said.

Some Virginia universities have quietly been taking steps to provide scholarships to descendants, as required under a 2021 state law. But otherwise there has been no sign of new scholarship programs being started since Trump returned to office, said Kirt von Daacke, a University of Virginia historian who leads a consortium of colleges studying slavery.

The Georgetown initiative focuses on descendants of slaves sold by Georgetown’s Jesuit priests to slaveholders in Louisiana.

The Virginia Theological Seminary makes annual cash payments to the descendants whose family members labored on its campus during slavery and Jim Crow eras. The private institution’s program is funded by an endowment started in 2019 that has grown from $1.7 million to $2.8 million. Payments to individuals vary based on the closest lineage to the family members and continue into perpetuity.

“We believe we’re the only educational institution in the United States which makes annual cash reparations payments” with no strings attached, said Nicky Burridge, the seminary’s spokeswoman.

“The moral repair, the healing aspect is as great as the monetary one,” said Ebonee Davis-Hayes, its director of reparations.

Hussein, Fields and Binkley write for the Associated Press.