Government

A historic collapse

One factor in the widespread disillusionment has been the Banco Master scandal. The financial imbroglio has delivered a black eye to both ends of Brazil’s political spectrum.

A range of business leaders, political figures, regulators and judges have been swept up in the scandal.

A mid-sized lender, Banco Master grew aggressively over the last decade by selling high-yield deposit certificates. Some of those certificates offered returns of up to 140 percent relative to Brazil’s benchmark interbank rate.

But Banco Master did not have the assets needed to sustain that output.

It lacked the money to pay back its risky loans, and what assets it did have were diverted to shell accounts, according to prosecutors.

Brazil’s Central Bank ultimately liquidated Banco Master in 2025, as the lender faced a major funding squeeze.

Its owner, Daniel Vorcaro, was subsequently arrested, accused of an array of financial crimes, including money laundering and fraud.

The collapse of Banco Master triggered a nearly $7.7bn payout from Brazil’s Credit Guarantee Fund, the largest disbursement in the nonprofit insurance’s history.

Investigators have suggested that Vorcaro protected his fraud scheme by cultivating influence among power brokers among Brazil’s elite.

Among those implicated in the scandal is Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate.

Last month, the Supreme Court unsealed documents showing he is under investigation for alleged corruption and money laundering in connection with Vorcaro.

Audio recordings have also surfaced, appearing to show Bolsonaro soliciting the disgraced bank leader for millions in funding. The money was slated as financing for Dark Horse, a film about his imprisoned father, Jair Bolsonaro.

Flavio Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing. He described the interaction as a private sponsorship opportunity, unrelated to the Banco Master scandal.

United States President Donald Trump has kicked off a 32-day campaign tour ahead of the November midterm elections that could see his Republican Party hurt by his handling of the war on Iran and the economy.

On Thursday, Trump travelled from Washington, DC, for back-to-back rallies in Texas and Oklahoma.

At his first stop in Denton, Texas, Trump sought to shift the narrative around his drooping approval ratings, offering a personal assessment of his administration’s performance.

“I give us an A+ on the government, on economics, on everything,” Trump told a crowd of supporters at the Peterbilt Motors Company, a truck manufacturer.

The president also blamed unfair media coverage for his growing unpopularity, arguing that his pre-election rally blitz was necessary to set the record straight.

“We’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country,” Trump said.

But Trump’s poll numbers have raised concerns about Republican prospects ahead of the November 3 midterm election.

Trump himself is not on the ballot, but Republican candidates across the country are seeking to defend the right-wing party’s majorities in both chambers of Congress, as well as key state and local offices.

The economy and Trump’s war on Iran are expected to weigh heavily on the election outcome.

On Thursday, The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released new poll results showing that 71 percent of Americans disapprove of the war, which has driven up the price of fuel.

About half of survey respondents also said they were worried they would not be able to afford food and petrol. Only 26 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the economy.

Taking centre stage

Still, despite record low approval ratings, Trump has positioned himself as key to the Republican midterm strategy.

At a first-of-its-kind Republican midterm convention in September, Trump encouraged voters to consider his record while at the ballot box. “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said.

During Thursday’s tour, he touted the impact of his tariff campaign, which he credited with creating thousands of manufacturing jobs.

“For decades, you were heartlessly betrayed by politicians, lousy politicians, who let foreign trade cheaters plunder your wages, loot your factories, close up your jobs,” Trump told Peterbilt workers. “They’d still be doing it if I wasn’t here, believe me.”

Trump’s tariffs, however, have been highly controversial, prompting a series of court challenges. Critics have argued that the sweeping import taxes surpass the president’s constitutional powers.

Trump also used his stump speech to ease concerns about the US-Israel war on Iran, which began on February 28. Both sides have declared victory, though a ceasefire remains elusive.

“Just as I promised, I’m ensuring that Iran will be very quickly ended. I will tell you the energy prices are going to be rapidly, rapidly coming down,” Trump said.

“We’ll win very easily right now,” he added. “I believe right after the election we’ll win, but maybe before the election.”

The war, however, resulted in Iran stopping commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for the global fuel trade.

The price of diesel — the fuel the trucks built at the plant use — soared to record highs of more than $6 per gallon (3.8 litres) last week. Petrol prices have similarly skyrocketed.

Hurting or helping his fellow Republicans?

Trump, however, has acknowledged that the stakes are high for his presidency in the upcoming midterms.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 35 seats in the 100-member Senate.

Losing Republican control of either chamber could create roadblocks for Trump’s legislative agenda during the final two years of his second term.

But Trump has also expressed concern that he could be impeached for a third time, after two prior impeachments during his first presidency.

At Thursday’s second stop, in Durant, Oklahoma, the Republican leader repeated that fear. “Pretend I’m running, please,” he told the crowd. “If we don’t win, they’ll end up impeaching me.”

Many of the places Trump is scheduled to visit this month are perceived as reliably Republican voting districts. Following his stops in Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday, Trump will be heading to Alabama, Ohio and Nebraska in the coming days.

Still, some elections that ordinarily would be considered shoo-ins for Republicans have grown more competitive in recent months.

In Texas, for instance, no Democrat has won a statewide race since the 1990s. But this year, Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, is struggling to win a Senate contest against Democrat James Talarico.

During both of Thursday’s stops, Trump sought to bolster Paxton’s prospects. At the Peterbilt factory, for instance, he called Paxton “the greatest attorney general in the United States of America”.

“We gotta get this guy elected,” Trump said, before pivoting to criticisms of Talarico, whom Republicans have sought to paint as out of touch with Texas’s large beef industry.

“He’s a vegan,” Trump said of Talarico, repeating an unsubstantiated rumour. “And vegans don’t do well in Texas.”

But leaked audio appeared to show Paxton lamenting the negative impact Trump had by holding the Republican midterm convention in Texas last month.

“It dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton reportedly said.

Trump touts social conservatism

Trump has nevertheless used his pre-election tour to highlight social issues he feels will help rally voters to the Republican cause.

On Thursday, he returned to familiar subjects like immigration and transgender rights, which he depicted as a part of the Democrats’ “radical” agenda.

“They want women in men’s sports. They want open borders. They want transgender mutilation for your children,” Trump said. “What the hell are you thinking about, you liberals?”

The president also used his Texas appearance to push back against critics of data centres, despite bipartisan concern.

Critics worry that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has fuelled the proliferation of data centres, which require large amounts of electricity and water to process mass data quantities.

While Trump has dismissed fears about AI as largely unfounded, a poll last month found 53 percent of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the technology’s environmental impacts.

Even fellow Republicans in Texas are responding to public pressure about the growing number of data centres, more than 300 of which are operational, with hundreds more in progress.

In August, Governor Greg Abbott called for an audit of all data centres to map their water and electricity usage, and the following month, Paxton in his role as state attorney general launched an investigation into whether they were complying with water reporting requirements.

Trump nevertheless used his Texas rally to tout the expansion of such enterprises.

“It’s a huge thing. It’s bigger than the industrial revolution,” he said, dismissing the concerns as part of a “scam”. He then explained he had urged AI companies to “take care of the people”.

“They’re making a fortune for the communities,” he added.

A report stating that the Trump administration directed funds towards right-wing groups comes ahead of Brazil’s presidential election.

Brazil’s attorney general has called on law enforcement to investigate alleged efforts by the United States to interfere in the country’s domestic politics through the diversion of funds to far-right causes.

Attorney General Jorge Messias called for the probe on Thursday, one day after the British newspaper The Guardian published a story suggesting that the administration of United States President Donald Trump planned to award $1m to right-wing civil groups opposing the Brazilian Supreme Court.

Messias stated in a social media post that foreign meddling “cannot be tolerated” and that the report represented “an important alert for Brazilian sovereignty”.

“The information is especially serious in light of Brazil’s electoral process and the recent episodes of external pressure on our institutions,” the attorney general added.

The report comes amid a tense presidential election in which leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is seeking re-election.

Lula has sought to focus attention on efforts Trump has undertaken to boost the prospects of far-right allies across Latin America, warning of threats to regional sovereignty.

Trump has endorsed multiple right-wing candidates ahead of elections across the region, sometimes hinging the possibility of economic support on the voting results.

He has also cultivated close relations with the family of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who lost to Lula in the last presidential election.

Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, is a frontrunner in the race to challenge Lula this year. Recent polls have shown Lula and Bolsonaro virtually tied ahead of the first round of voting on October 4.

Flavio Bolsonaro met with Trump at the White House in May. He has promised closer ties with the US, while Lula has positioned himself as a critic of Trump’s interventionist approach to Latin American politics and security.

The Guardian report published on Wednesday states that the Trump administration sought to redirect $175m from the State Department’s human rights fund to various far-right causes around the world.

The recipients allegedly included groups advocating for white Afrikaners in South Africa that the Trump administration has falsely portrayed as victims of a “genocide” and efforts in Brazil to counter what the US called “lawfare and censorship”.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has been a subject of frequent criticism from the political right, both in Brazil and the US.

Much of that criticism stems from the 2025 conviction of Jair Bolsonaro for involvement in an alleged coup plot, designed to subvert his loss to Lula in the 2022 election.

Bolsonaro and his allies, including Trump, have depicted the case as an instance of political persecution.

Citing the trial, Trump last year placed 50-percent tariffs on certain Brazilian goods that he has since removed.

At the time, he announced the tariffs in a letter that denounced Bolsonaro’s prosecution. “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace,” Trump wrote.

The Trump administration also revoked the visas of Brazilian judicial officials involved in Bolsonaro’s case in an effort to have it tossed out. It also levied short-lived sanctions against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, accusing him of “an unlawful witch hunt” against right-wing voices.

Bolsonaro was ultimately convicted and sentenced to a 27-year prison sentence in September 2025.

In June, one of his sons, Eduardo Bolsonaro, was sentenced to more than four years in prison after a court ruled he had lobbied for US interference in his father’s case.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to review a Trump administration policy denying bond hearings for immigrants as the government carries out a sweeping crackdown.

The justices will consider whether immigrants who have been living in the U.S. have a right to a hearing to determine if they should remain detained while challenging their possible deportation.

The case will test a key pillar of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Most appeals courts to have considered the issue have found that it violates federal law to detain immigrants, including those living in the U.S. illegally, without a bond hearing. Those decisions conflict with rulings by the 5th and 8th circuits, which held that immigrants accused of illegally entering and remaining in the U.S. must be detained while their deportation cases are pending.

The high court agreed to hear the case of Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a citizen of Brazil. Authorities say he entered the United States illegally two decades ago and applied for asylum in 2016. He sought a bond hearing after an immigration judge determined that his detention was mandatory following his September 2025 arrest.

He has never been charged or convicted of a crime, his attorneys said. The court is expected to hear the case in the coming months.

President Trump’s administration had urged the high court to take up a different but related case that involves the broader constitutional implications of the new policy.

Attorneys from the Republican administration argue the circuits’ split is “disrupting the orderly administration of immigration law.” They say the nation’s courts have been inundated with thousands of petitions filed by immigrants challenging the government’s legal interpretation.

“The result is an unworkable patchwork of inconsistent immigration enforcement, where aliens present without admission are subject to mandatory detention in some circuits but are entitled to bond hearings and often released in others,” lawyers for the administration wrote.

The plaintiffs are immigrants represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says hundreds of district court judges have joined most circuits in rejecting the Trump administration’s new reading of the statutes. Plaintiffs’ lawyers say the administration is trying to deny bond hearings for immigrants apprehended anywhere in the U.S. — no matter how long they’ve lived in the country — rather than limiting the restriction to noncitizens stopped at the border.

“Millions of noncitizens could be affected by the government’s new interpretation,” ACLU attorneys wrote.

The Trump administration says its new mandatory detention policy is legal under a 1996 immigration law. The policy change departs from the practices of prior administrations, which typically allowed most noncitizens without criminal records to request a bond hearing if they were arrested away from the border.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

Mammoth deal has raised questions about corporate consolidation and editorial independence in media.

A United States judge has entered an order giving the green light for the media giant Paramount to complete its $110bn acquisition of entertainment company Warner Bros., despite fears about the long-term impacts of media consolidation.

On Wednesday, US District Court Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin approved a settlement between Paramount, Warner Bros, and a group of 12 states that had sued to block the merger.

In her ruling, Martinez-Olguin described the proposed deal as a “fair, reasonable, and good faith approach to address the competitive harms”.

Analysts have long raised concerns about the acquisition, one of the largest media mergers in history.

The coalition of states that sued to block the deal, led by California, had argued that combining Paramount with Warner Bros would effectively stifle media competition. They estimated that nearly one-third of all theatrical releases and basic cable programming would be consolidated under the merger.

But the states abandoned their lawsuit in favour of a settlement on September 21.

The five-year agreement requires Paramount to abide by theatrical film release quotas, committing to 30 releases per year in the US.

It also mandates that the combined company must keep negotiations with cable providers for Warner-owned channels separate from its deals for Paramount-owned channels.

The settlement approved on Wednesday also includes the creation of a five-member panel meant to safeguard the editorial independence of CNN and CBS, two major news networks.

But sceptics have pointed out that the merger puts a large swath of US media under the control of David Ellison, who leads Paramount.

Under Wednesday’s agreement, Ellison is in charge of appointments to the board that would oversee news independence.

The Paramount CEO is the son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a strong backer of pro-Israel causes who has close ties to the administration of President Donald Trump.

The founder of the film production company Skydance, David Ellison acquired Paramount last year as part of another controversial merger.

The 2025 Paramount-Skydance deal brought CBS under Ellison’s control. Ahead of the merger, sceptics questioned the abrupt cancellation of the CBS comedy show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which had been critical of Trump.

Ellison later installed Bari Weiss, a pro-Israel media figure, as the head of CBS News in a move that also raised questions about diminished independence within major journalism outlets.

Some critics depicted Wednesday’s settlement as a further capitulation to powerful corporate interests.

“Allowing one Trump-aligned, foreign-owned conglomerate to dominate American news and entertainment is a disastrous outcome,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said in the wake of the settlement’s announcement.

But public officials like California Governor Gavin Newsom had called on his state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta to scrap the 12-state effort to block the deal and to pursue a settlement instead.

Paramount emerged victorious from a bidding war with the streaming giant Netflix in February to win control of Warner Bros’s holdings.

That includes a series of media and entertainment services, including the film studio Warner Bros Pictures, CNN and HBO Max. The Trump administration approved the deal without alterations in June.

Seven Minnesota judges face ethics complaint after speaking publicly about the US president’s immigration crackdown.

The United States Justice Department has filed a misconduct complaint against seven federal judges in Minnesota who spoke publicly about the pressure their courts came under during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The judges spoke to The New York Times this month about dealing with a flood of cases during Operation Metro Surge, an immigration crackdown that led to thousands of arrests in the Minneapolis-St Paul area from December to February.

The Justice Department says it crossed an ethical line by talking publicly about the cases.

Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the judges of showing “obvious bias” against the Trump administration and called on them to step aside from any cases involving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“When we have a situation like we have now, where you have a judge, a couple of judges, just not only violating the canons in our view but also showing bias in what they’re saying, we have no choice but to act,” Blanche told reporters.

The judges say they did nothing wrong. A spokesperson for Minnesota’s federal court system said legal experts had found that the judges were “well within the ethical rules” when they spoke to the newspaper.

The complaint is the latest in a series of clashes between the Trump administration and the judiciary, which has blocked some of the president’s policies and, in several cases, accused government lawyers of failing to follow court orders.

One of the judges named in the complaint, Patrick Schiltz, alleged that the government did not comply with nearly 100 court orders related to immigration enforcement in January alone.

In one ruling, he wrote that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “is not a law unto itself”.

Schiltz was nominated by Republican President George W Bush and previously clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

He later told The New York Times that what happened in Minnesota’s federal courts during the crackdown “created a grave threat to the rule of law”.

Schiltz also pointed to guidance issued by a federal judicial ethics panel in February, saying that judges can speak publicly about issues such as the rule of law and judicial independence.

“That is exactly what I did,” he said.

Siegfried Muresan’s loss of the confidence motion increases the prospect for snap elections.

Romania’s pro-European Prime Minister-designate Siegfried Muresan has failed to win a parliamentary vote of confidence, prolonging a political crisis seen as a boost for the rising far right.

Muresan, a liberal European Parliament member who was the latest of three designated prime ministers, secured only 182 votes out of the 233 required to secure the confidence motion on Wednesday, according to the official count.

The far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) largely boycotted the vote.

The 45-year-old had proposed what he described as a “reform-oriented” governing programme under his centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL), which teamed up with the Save Romania Union party, or USR, and the small ethnic Hungarian UDMR party.

President Nicusor Dan said he would nominate a new prime minister candidate on Monday afternoon, after holding talks with the leaders of the parliamentary parties, to avoid snap elections.

Romania saw the collapse of a pro-European coalition government in May, when governing social democrats, together with the opposition far right, ousted liberal Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan in a no-confidence motion at that time.

The far right, which comprises about a third of Parliament, threatened to impeach the president if he does not call early elections once the conditions are met.

Romania, a member of the EU and NATO that borders Ukraine, has not held snap elections since the fall of communism in 1989.

Political analyst Cristian Pirvulescu told the AFP news agency that snap elections would lead to another fragmented Parliament, but with an emboldened far right.

“Early elections mean that, from the moment they are called, it would take four months before a new government could be formed,” Pirvulescu told AFP. “Due to political instability, Romania finds itself in a very complicated economic situation. Four months is already a very long time.”

The country of 19 million has been struggling for months with the highest public deficit and inflation in the European Union.

Sept. 30, 2026 9:17 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is removing Syria from a list of countries that are not allowed to purchase or import U.S. weaponry, a step that is part of a monthslong process of easing sanctions on the new government in Damascus and its leaders.

In a notice published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the State Department said it was amending its International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, so that Syria no longer was among the nations subject to a policy of denial for licenses and other approvals needed for the sale of U.S. weapons and munitions.

The change effective Thursday means that arms sales requests from Syria will now be considered on a case-by-case basis.

President Donald Trump acted last year to ease economic sanctions on Syria that had been in place for decades during now-ousted President Bashar Assad’s rule. In August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio rescinded Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, helping paving the way for the latest step in drawing closer to the current government.

The State Department has also announced plans to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. It has been closed for 14 years.

With Syria’s removal from the ITAR blacklist, only seven countries remain subject to the policy of denial for licenses for U.S. arms exports: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and Venezuela.

Syria’s interim president, former rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, overthrew the Assad government nearly two years ago and has embarked on a policy of change that has impressed the Trump administration. His moves have led to hopes of eventual stability in a country that was wracked by civil war and the Islamic State insurgency that engulfed northeast and western Iraq for years.

Wednesday’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq may mean that the Syrian government plays a greater role in preventing an IS resurgence.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

United States Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to cut the number of positions in the US military reserved for generals and admirals by 20 percent, raising concerns about political interference in the military’s leadership amid strained relations with senior Pentagon officials.

An announcement is expected on Wednesday when Hegseth gives his “State of the Force” address to junior officers and enlisted personnel at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

The Pentagon has presented previous cuts as a way to reduce bureaucracy. But analysts say Hegseth’s latest changes may be aimed at sidelining experienced commanders, discouraging dissent and appointing more officers loyal to President Donald Trump to the ranks.

So is the US military too top-heavy, and what could the cuts mean? Here’s what we know.

What is Hegseth planning?

Citing Pentagon officials, The Associated Press news agency has reported that Hegseth will double the 10 percent reduction in top-ranking personnel ordered last year, bringing the total decrease to 20 percent by January 1, 2027. The plan affects roughly 800 general and admiral positions across the one- to four-star ranks.

Congress sets statutory limits on the number of generals and admirals. A Congressional Research Service report recorded 848 active-duty generals and admirals in September 2025, below the authorised maximum of 857.

Cutting positions does not necessarily mean immediately dismissing everyone occupying them. An official told the Reuters news agency that some roles would be eliminated, while others would be assigned to lower-ranking officers.

Why are top-ranking military positions being removed?

The argument for reducing senior ranks predates Hegseth’s tenure, with supporters saying fewer layers of command would reduce administrative work and give officers closer to operations greater authority.

Walter Ladwig, a political scientist specialising in US foreign policy at King’s College London, said there is a credible case for reform. “Since the end of the Cold War, the overall size of the force has declined significantly, but we haven’t seen a corresponding reduction in the number of flag officers,” he told Al Jazeera.

“At the same time, we’ve seen headquarters and staffs proliferate.”

Trump and Hegseth have already fired or pushed into retirement more than two dozen military leaders since Trump took office in January 2025.

Those removed include General Randy George, the US Army’s top uniformed officer, in April, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, in February 2025. The administration also dismissed the only two women serving as four-star officers, alongside other senior female officers.

In February 2025, Trump also fired Air Force General CQ Brown as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of a wider shake-up of top military leadership.

Other departures have been of civilian leaders. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned in late August after reported disagreements over Hegseth’s handling of senior military personnel.

The dismissals, alongside blocked promotions, have raised questions about how the administration selects commanders and whether professional disagreements could jeopardise careers. Robert Ralston, a lecturer in political science and international studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, said the proposed reductions should be weighed alongside these earlier decisions.

“These cuts appear to be part of a broader, sustained effort by Hegseth to fill the ranks based on political, rather than meritocratic, considerations,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Politics is driving these decisions, in my view.”

What political fallout could there be from this?

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona criticised Hegseth’s changes at the Pentagon. “The US military doesn’t need more testosterone; it needs better leadership at this point,” Kelly told MS NOW’s Morning Joe programme last week.

“The consequences of firing all these admirals and generals are that we’re losing a portion, a good portion, of a generation of great leadership.”

David Galbreath, professor of war and technology at the University of Bath in the UK, told Al Jazeera that resistance from Congress and military leaders could complicate the changes.

He pointed to the opposition that arose to President Jimmy Carter’s plans to withdraw US ground troops from South Korea as an example of how military and congressional pressure can constrain a president.

“I suspect that after the election, we are likely to see a much more confrontational Congress with investigations and impeachments of Hegseth,” he said.

Whether that prediction comes true will likely depend on November’s congressional elections and whether the Republican Party retains control of both chambers of Congress.

What criticisms have been made of Hegseth?

Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been marked by controversy and tensions with senior officials. In March 2025, he shared details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen in a Signal chat group which inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief.

A number of US media reports about the dwindling supplies of weapons in the Middle East prompted his department to investigate leaks and restrict journalists’ access earlier this year. The New York Times reported in August that about 50 Joint Staff military and civilian officials had undergone polygraph tests amid growing mistrust inside the Pentagon.

Hegseth has meanwhile made ending what he calls “woke” culture a central priority, introducing new physical fitness requirements and abolishing diversity policies.

Ralston said the combination of dismissals and blocked promotions could damage morale and the military’s future leadership. “His relationship with senior military leaders has been adversarial, his scuttling of promotions has undoubtedly damaged morale, and will have long-term consequences for leadership pipelines within the Department of Defense,” he said.

King’s College’s Ladwig also described Hegseth’s relationship with senior Pentagon leaders as unusually confrontational but cautioned against interpreting every proposed cut as a power struggle.

“When a military is under civilian control, it means that the elected government has the right to determine defence priorities and reorganise the armed forces accordingly,” he said.

But Ladwig warned that the changes could encourage officers to hold back their professional recommendations when advising senior politicians. “That might create incentives for military officers to censor themselves rather than provide candid professional military advice, particularly if being politically aligned with the administration is seen as a path to success,” he said.

“This is a very worrisome pathology, and it’s the kind of thing that produces ineffective militaries in dictatorships.”

The high court grants an emergency petition ahead of expected arguments in the case, slated for December.

The United States Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to continue third-country deportations, halting a lower-court ruling that paused such removals over questions of due process.

On Tuesday, the high court granted the administration’s emergency request to resume the deportations, which involve sending immigrants to countries they may have no connection to.

The court’s order was unsigned, as is typical for an emergency petition. It also does not include an explanation or a list of how the justices voted.

But at the bottom of Tuesday’s order, the court’s three left-leaning justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan – indicated they would have denied the Trump administration’s petition.

The Supreme Court’s decision to pause the lower court ruling is temporary. The order calls for arguments to be heard in December.

That hearing comes as Trump administration continues its appeal against the lower court’s ruling, handed down by Judge Brian Murphy in Boston, Massachusetts.

Murphy had ruled that immigrants must be given a “meaningful” chance to raise safety concerns before their removal to third-party countries.

In pausing such deportations, Murphy indicated that some immigrants may have been denied the opportunity to challenge their deportations as part of their due process rights.

Tuesday, however, is not the first time the Supreme Court justices have weighed in on the practice of forcibly sending people to third countries, which Trump dramatically stepped up since his return to office in 2025.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to implement the “largest deportation operation in American history”, and his officials have argued that third-country deportations are a means of removing individuals whose home countries may not accept them.

In June 2025, the Supreme Court also issued an unsigned order allowing such removals to proceed.

That cleared the way for eight men, including nationals of Cuba, Myanmar and Vietnam, to be deported to South Sudan, a country the US State Department advises against visiting because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict”.

The Department of Homeland Security at the time called the removals “a win”, while rights groups said the move flouted basic legal protections.

Critics have expressed concern that many of the governments receiving third-country deportations have a record of human rights abuses.

Third-country deportations have been used to bypass court protection orders that prevent immigrants from being sent back to their home countries due to fears of persecution.

But advocates say that some of those third-party countries have ultimately sent deportees, including asylum seekers, back to the places where they feared they would be at risk of torture or other harms.

At least 35 countries have signed agreements with the Trump administration to take in the third-country nationals, according to a tally by the nonprofits Refugees International and Human Rights First.

The groups estimate that more than 25,000 people have been subject to third-country deportations so far.

On Monday, human rights experts at the United Nations wrote to the ‌US ‌government urging a halt to such removals, warning they were putting deportees at heightened risk of abuse.

“At gravest risk are children, women, persons with disabilities, victims of trafficking, LGBT persons, human rights defenders, stateless persons and other people in extremely vulnerable situations,” the experts said.

On Tuesday, Burundi became the latest country to enter an agreement with the US to take non-citizen deportations.

Officials said the country would only take in people who were not facing prosecution and had no links to “terrorism”.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday let President Trump’s administration continue swiftly deporting people to countries other than their own for now, while the justices consider whether the policy is legal.

The apparent 6-3 order halts a lower-court decision. It requires the government to give migrants a chance to object before they are sent to countries to which they have no ties.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in December.

The Trump administration said the lower-court order forced the cancellation of a deportation flight carrying about 70 people bound for three countries last week.

The justices have sided with the administration once before on the core Trump administration policy, allowing deportation flights to temporarily continue last year.

The court said it will consider several questions: whether the policy is lawful, whether lower courts had the authority to issue a sweeping block and other questions the government deems appropriate.

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported some 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries, including Liberia and Guyana. The vast majority have been sent to Mexico.

Trump’s Republican administration has said that it sends people with final deportation orders to third countries when they can’t be returned to their homelands or their native countries won’t accept them, including those who have criminal convictions. Those governments provide assurances that people won’t be persecuted or tortured, federal attorneys said.

But some migrants have nevertheless found themselves imprisoned in countries they’d never heard of before their arrivals. Others also face serious safety risks and are left with little choice except to return to the home countries they were fleeing. Many have no criminal convictions and have been found to be at risk of torture or persecution, attorneys for the immigrants said.

The case comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which has pledged to deport millions of people who are living in the United States illegally.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.

America.gov for now functions like a chatbot comparable to ChatGPT or Claude, pointing users to official gov’t websites.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump has launched a new website called America.gov aimed at simplifying access to government information.

The website functions much like a chatbot comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and points users to official government sources for questions such as passport renewals.

The president announced the new site on Tuesday alongside several Cabinet officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

In a speech, the president claimed that the website would not store user information and used the opportunity to tout simplified access to information about elections and applications for citizenship.

The site is powered by Google’s Gemini AI and xAI’s Grok, according to the chief design officer, Joe Gebbia.

The executive order announcing the new site calls it “a unified digital front door to the Federal Government for every individual in the United States seeking Federal information or services”.

It also says the site will provide “an entry through which an individual may sign in, communicate in plain language, receive accurate answers, and, where authorized and technically available, complete Government transactions without being required to navigate the websites of multiple agencies.”

White House officials told Al Jazeera that the website will abide by the security protocols of the government agency users inquire about, and it will be retained by those agencies and not America.gov, for example, Medicare.

Al Jazeera tested the answers the website provides to see how they align with the president’s views.

When asked “who is the fake news?”, it said, “I don’t label news outlets or comment on media.” When asked who won the 2020 presidential election, it said Joe Biden. When asked whether the department in which Pete Hegseth is secretary is the Department of Defense or Department of War, it said, “Department of Defense (DoD). That is still the name in statute until Congress changes it.”

When asked about obtaining specific records, such as individual tax information, citizenship records, political donations or Securities and Exchange Commission filings, it directed users to the government websites that provide that data for individuals.

However, in the presentation announcing the new site, Rubio showed that, in the future, the website may be able to help Americans apply for passports directly through the site and even take and upload their passport photos.

The website was created in coordination with the National Design Studio, which is part of the Executive Office of the President and was established by Trump in August 2025.

WASHINGTON — Under a light rain on Sunday at the Australian ambassador’s residence in Washington, CNN hosted its third annual tennis tournament, the Kangaroo Cup, pitting Beltway journalists against administration officials. The event aims to inject some levity into an historically adversarial relationship, reminding both sides of the spirit of the game. Themed drinks and tennis whites set the tone.

White House officials played with grace. But the mood this year was altogether different down Pennsylvania Avenue. Despite a federal judge demanding the administration reverse course on President Trump’s punitive actions toward his disfavored news outlets — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — he has refused to resume full access to the storied cable news channel, dismissing its reporters as “fake news.”

It is only the latest attack on press freedom by a president whose drive to punish critics and exert influence over the media appears to be growing.

During last week’s lavish state visit for Xi Jinping, Trump praised China for having “the friendliest press corps” and dismissed their repression of speech, despite the World Press Freedom Index ranking China among the world’s worst offenders — at the bottom of the list, alongside North Korea and Eritrea — for restrictions on journalists.

Five times in the last two months, the president has sneered at and insulted female reporters, mocking their appearance or dismissing their credentials.

He has declined to name a successor for his former press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, whose final news conference, on Aug. 27, was one of only a handful of briefings held throughout the summer. His administration launched its own streaming service last week, called Trump TV, in an attempt to circumvent traditional cable news. And on Monday, he posted renderings of the White House briefing room reconverted to its former use as a presidential pool and spa.

Trump’s escalating attacks on the press come just weeks before the midterm elections, as former officials and election experts warn the administration could seek to undermine confidence in the results. They also come at a precarious moment for public trust in the media, with more Americans saying limits on the press can be justified to combat misinformation.

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month found that 73% of Americans regard a free press as “very” or “extremely” important to society. Yet the country remains deeply divided over whether journalists should be barred from reporting “inaccurate” information, with a majority, 53%, supporting limits in some circumstances — even if it means the government itself would have the final say in determining what is true.

Trump’s attempt to bar three outlets from the White House grounds came just three days after the Pew poll was released.

“Plenty of presidents have complained about the press before. And presidents have restricted certain forms of press access or press action during wartime,” said Peter Kastor, chair of the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. “In the moment — and especially afterward — Americans condemned this as antithetical to the constitutional protections for press freedom and the national commitment to an open democracy.

“What I find most striking about Trump’s press action is that he has made it unabashedly personal,” Kastor added. “He doesn’t like the way media outlets are covering him, so he is going to punish them.”

President Nixon famously limited White House access for the Washington Post over its coverage of the Watergate scandal. But he never attempted to bar press credentials completely — and ultimately authorized the conversion of the pool facility into the briefing room that exists today.

Other presidents have jostled with the press. President Obama was accused of limiting access to independent photojournalists, and famously favored nontraditional media outlets at the advent of the social media age. President George W. Bush limited his personal interactions with the press and curtailed access to government records.

Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, once stated he “deplored” the “putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.”

Yet, “it is however an evil for which there is no remedy,” he also said. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Trump’s particular style — as a showman and his own spokesman — makes his relationship with the media innately personal, said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.”

“Presidents almost always feel that bad press is a feature of their staff’s poor communication of their policies — not that the policies themselves are unpopular or ill-advised,” Rudalevige said.

“Since President Trump does so much of his communication, though, this deflection is less available,” he added, and “thus the problem is with the press itself, not the policy or its purveyor.”

CNN’s legal fight continues, even after securing temporary reprieve from a judicial restraining order. So does the Associated Press’ lawsuit over the administration’s effort last year to punish the wire service for refusing to adopt Trump’s preferred name, “Gulf of America,” for the internationally recognized Gulf of Mexico.

While he keeps losing in court on 1st Amendment grounds, the president keeps testing new limits, looking for what will stick.

On the tennis court Sunday, at least, his administration won.

Yemen’s government forces have conducted multiple air and ground operations in the southwestern governorate of Taiz in 24 hours as they intensify attacks against the Iran-backed Houthi group.

The government’s military media centre on Sunday claimed a number of operations against the rebels, including air strikes on Houthi positions in five locations across the governorate.

More than 146,000 people have been displaced since the fighting erupted in July after a period of relative calm since a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 2022.

In recent weeks, the Houthis have made dramatic territorial gains against the government forces, seizing the strategic Red Sea coastal city of Mocha and expanding their control over the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a global maritime chokepoint connecting Europe to Asia.

⁠Rashad ⁠al-Alimi, the head of the Presidential Leadership Council, has called on citizens to mobilise and join the fight against the Houthis as the government has stepped up its attacks against the Iran-backed group in an effort to stop their advance and regain lost territory.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which has faced Houthi attacks on its soil since fighting escalated further this month, has been turning to its allies, including Pakistan and Turkiye, for support.

Saudi Arabia backs Yemen’s internationally recognised government.

Here’s what we know about the latest fighting and the humanitarian conditions the impoverished country faces:

What to know about the latest fighting

According to the military media centre on Sunday, dozens of Houthi fighters, including field commanders, were killed or wounded in the previous 24 hours of fighting near Taiz’s capital, which is also named Taiz.

Government forces have carried out operations in several areas of the governorate, including the al-Waziiya district in the west, weapons sites and ammunition depots at Mafraq Mawiya and al-Dhukrah in the east, a Houthi gathering in the Hayfan district in the south and against military vehicles in the Gurab area in the northwest.

Government forces also thwarted infiltration attempts on the al-Ahtoub front and in Hadran as they carried out shelling of Houthi gatherings on the al-Kadha and al-Aqroud fronts, the media centre said.

It added that several Houthi military vehicles were damaged in the attacks.

Al Jazeera could not verify the battlefield claims.

“Government forces say they have made advances in the southern Taiz governorate, taking control of several areas and higher ground. Among them is Jabal Bazel, a mountaintop that places Houthi supply lines within target range,” Al Jazeera’s Maha Ali said on Saturday, reporting from Taiz.

“These developments point to significant and potentially decisive ground operations in recent hours.”

Ali said al-Alimi expressed confidence that government forces were capable of restoring control over the whole country. Houthis currently control vast swaths of northern and western Yemen while the government controls the south and east.

Since the current fighting erupted, the Houthis have accused the Saudis of carrying out attacks in Yemen and promised to prevent Saudi tankers from passing through Bab al-Mandeb, which Riyadh has been using as an alternative shipping route to the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran in effect has closed the Strait of Hormuz since the United States and Israel began a war on it in February. Before the conflict, a fifth of the world’s oil supplies had passed through that waterway.

Government forces, meanwhile, accused the Houthis of using Iranian air defence weapons and said they pose a danger to aircraft.

“These Houthi weapons pose a serious threat to international flight paths over the Red Sea and operate using a heat-tracking system,” Brigadier General Majed al-Nazili, the official spokesperson for the Yemeni government forces, said on social media.

“The weapons employed are capable of attacking military or civilian targets without the ability to distinguish between them, thereby endangering the safety of civil aviation and the lives of passengers.”

Early on Saturday, a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said its air defence systems intercepted and destroyed two ballistic missiles and two drones launched by the Houthis towards Riyadh and Khamis Mushait in Saudi Arabia.

What has been the regional response to the conflict?

On Saturday, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, addressed the UN General Assembly and called on the international community to condemn Houthi actions against the kingdom and in Yemen.

At the same forum, Yemeni Vice President Abdullah Abdulkader al-Alimi-Bawzer warned that the Houthis were using shipping security “as a tool for blackmail”.

“It is taking hostage the entire global economy,” he said.

The secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Jassim Mohammed al-Budaiwi, on Saturday strongly condemned the recent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia.

“This dangerous escalation constitutes a flagrant violation of the Kingdom’s sovereignty and poses a direct threat to the security and safety of civilians and the stability of the region,” al-Budaiwi said in a statement.

Iran has denied it has any role in the Yemen conflict. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera that the actions of the Houthis were not connected to Iran and Tehran stands in solidarity with “everyone subjected to injustice”.

He urged the Houthis and Saudi Arabia to resolve their differences through dialogue, saying “a brother should not fight his brother,” and offered Iran’s help in ending the dispute. “We will not be warmongers,” he said.

On Friday, Iran delivered a ceasefire offer, which US President Donald Trump has rejected. It included Yemen and Lebanon. Tehran offered to open the Strait of Hormuz if the US fulfils its conditions, which include the lifting of Washington’s naval blockade on Iranian ports, a sanctions waiver and the release of Iran’s frozen assets.

Could Saudi allies join the conflict?

Saudi Arabia’s allies have rallied behind it amid intense fighting between the Yemeni government forces and Houthis.

Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman said on Saturday that there would be continued joint efforts with Pakistan to confront attacks against the kingdom in accordance with the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed last month.

He held talks with Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir on Thursday. A day earlier, the military chiefs of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye jointly reviewed threats facing Saudi Arabia at a meeting in the Saudi capital.

Multiple Saudi cities, including Riyadh, have been hit by drones and missiles attributed to the Houthis.

Meanwhile, France confirmed on Friday that it was sending troops to guard the major oil terminal at Yanbu, a Saudi port city on the Red Sea, but added that it was not joining the conflict. Yanbu has major oil storage and refining facilities and is connected by the East-West Pipeline, which can carry up to seven million barrels a day. The pipeline was damaged in a drone attack carried out from a group based in Iraq.

The US has so far not pledged military involvement, but the Saudi foreign minister said the kingdom was “continuing to work with our partners in the US”. On September 14, the commander of the US military’s Central Command, Brad Cooper, met the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in Jeddah in the wake of the Houthis’ seizure of Mocha.

What’s the state of humanitarian conditions?

At least 146,000 people have been displaced in the Arab region’s most impoverished country over the past three weeks, most of whom were uprooted from or within Taiz governorate, according to Yemen’s UNICEF country representative, Akhil Iyer.

More than 3,000 people fled across the Red Sea to Djibouti over several days earlier this month, Djibouti state media have reported, with the UN warning that number could rise.

The number of casualties is still not confirmed as the rival sides have made conflicting claims. As per media reports, the death toll runs into the hundreds.

UNICEF has verified that at least 15 children have been killed and 14 injured in the conflict since early September while three have been reported missing.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 22 million people in Yemen require humanitarian assistance and protection services; 18.3 million people face acute food insecurity; and more than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished.

Authorities warn residents that extreme conditions could pose risks and urge people to stay away from flooded areas.

Residents of the northeastern United States are facing a powerful storm known as a nor’easter that has knocked out power and caused flooding across the region.

The storm has led to the cancellation of more than 400 flights and power outages affecting more than 88,000 homes and businesses as of Saturday afternoon local time. That figure is down from a high of 119,000 earlier in the day.

Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, said that the storm is likely to persist, with “a lot of high winds, a lot of high tides and heavy rain possibility over the next few days for the northeastern US”.

The governors of New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency in counties expected to see the worst of the storm, including New York City, on Friday.

Authorities have also warned residents about the risks of flooding and high tides, cautioning people to stay away from the beach and areas inundated with water.

“Anyone who goes in or near the water this weekend is literally gambling with their life,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

Despite the warnings, people have been seen kayaking down flooded streets in Long Island, New York, while others took advantage of large swells in Hampton, New Hampshire.

“In all the canals, the water is up really high and coming into people’s back yards,” Jay Boyd, a resident of Ocean City, Maryland, told The Associated Press news agency.

Oravec said that nor’easters are not unusual as the region of New England enters the autumn season, but that “this might be a little earlier than average for a big storm”.

About 425 flights have been cancelled and 1,338 delayed so far on Saturday, according to data from the flight tracker FlightAware.

Concerts and sporting events have also been cancelled, including musician Ed Sheeran’s scheduled shows in the state of Massachusetts on Friday and Saturday.